


The Gospel According to Poppy

by homo_pink



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mental Institution, Childhood Memories, Clowns, Dolls, First Love, Jealousy, M/M, Mild Coulrophilia, Mild Coulrophobia, Neediness, Past Underage Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-30
Updated: 2018-11-30
Packaged: 2019-09-02 15:11:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 34,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16789432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/homo_pink/pseuds/homo_pink
Summary: This room of the hospital is crowded with couches and cushions and little mock cactuses in little clay cups. A radio is on in the corner but it’s only as loud as a lullaby. It’s just for atmosphere.





	The Gospel According to Poppy

**Author's Note:**

> for spn-reversebang 2018 - for [Phoenix1966](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phoenix1966/pseuds/Phoenix1966)'s absolutely gorgeous [art](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16606685) ♡ 
> 
> please go have a look to see all the dreamy things they created. 
> 
> thank you, phoenix1966, for patiently putting up with all of my setbacks and timing issues and for giving me such inspired and inspiring pieces to write for. i would live in your art post if i could manage it physically.

“I made him for you, Sammy.”

The babysitter was in the other room, cooking Sam’s afternoon snack and catching up on _Cuna de Lobos_ on the tiny TV roosted atop the fridge, when Dean came home from school with a soft lump causing the outer zipper-pouch of his backpack to protrude in the small way that the babysitter’s belly did. _Con un niño_ , she’d told Sam, sometimes rubbing or smiling at her little ballooned stomach. 

Sam didn’t understand ‘pregnant’ and Sam didn’t understand ‘school’. School was the pinnacle bad guy, was why Dean had started leaving Sam—for great big chunks of the day, nearly every day. Sam did not like school. 

This day was a pink day and a mild mist clung to the junker cars in the uneven drive, held to the porch railing. Dean, in a tremble of excitement, came hurtling up the concrete front steps, the good guy hero’s penultimate return, and in his hurry forgot the rule of not letting the screen door slam behind him. 

“Muchacho!” 

But that was the only distracted thing the babysitter said. The eggs were still scrambling buttery. 

It was easy for Sam to put aside that set of watercolors and the coloring book that hadn’t belonged to him previously and didn’t really belong to him then either. It came from the babysitter’s toy chest, where she kept things for all the kids she _babysat_ to play with. It used to give Sam such dismay, this word and the idea of it, the first time he heard daddy say it, until Dean explained it in a way Sam could understand and retain, said _look after_ and _protect_ and _she won’t sit on you, they don’t really do that._

And besides, Dean had said the day before they rode up to the next unfamiliar house, even if she did, she wouldn’t do it to you—you’re not a baby. Arm slung around Sam’s peanut shoulders, Dean bore encouragement in a somewhat holey smile. Sam didn’t know how to say that yes, yes Sam was, he was so still a baby. 

Sam wanted to go to ‘school’ with Dean, stay with him and sit next to him, and Sam thought, resolvedly, that it would even be okay if Dean did sit on him. 

“What is it?”

His stare stuck to Dean’s hands during the big reveal, after Dean said—lookit, I got something, as Dean tugged the carefully tucked tumble of cloth free from his bag, handed it over in one hand, though Sam took the thing in two, ceremonially.

“This is—Poppy.”

Poppy, Sam thought, eyes glittering over, and Dean rushed out, maybe a little embarrassment there, “but you can change his name if you don’t like it.”

It was a perfect name for a perfect thing so Sam only shook his head. Said, “Poppy.”

Poppy was a clown made from a sock, with frazzled orange yarn hair looping, a triangle felt hat, a pom-pom nose that he wore the same color as his happy mouth, incurably red. Painted pink cheek stains and markered on eyelashes, Poppy’s googly eyes had been hot glued on and then double secured with punctures to both eyes and sewn tight to the fabric. 

One of the parent volunteers probably did that part, deciding Dean too young and breakable to do it alone, though Dean was neither and hadn’t actually ever been.

A sock puppet clown that Dean had made—had _made_ , himself! Poppy didn’t have arms, nor legs, and Sam liked that, the indefinable quality of him, his design that meant he wouldn’t be able to run away. Sam had already grown sick of things going away from him. Mom’s heaven trip, dad’s hunting trips, and now Dean’s rotten first grade field trips. Poppy was decked out in a wild blue bow-tie and Poppy wouldn’t be leaving Sam ever. 

When you opened your hand, Poppy even had tonsils! It made Sam giggle so bad, Dean always thought of everything. When you closed your hand, Poppy was cheery again. He came halfway down Sam’s forearm. 

Socks were scarce for Winchester men; Sam knew well how big a deal this was, Dean donating one of his whitest to make Sam’s second childhood friend.

“It’s just a guy in funny makeup,” was how Dean calmed him from a cryfest a month prior when they’d flipped through the six or so channels they got in the trailer home they’d occupied for a dot of time, looking for morning cartoons and finding Bozo’s Circus. The giant white ruffle collar was distressing but Cooky the Clown was the worst, the tragedy of his expression shook Sam to fast tears.

But Poppy was different. He was _for_ Sam. He was _from_ Dean.

So he can be with you when I can’t, was what Sam understood. 

He was fabric and fun, and Sam could curl up with him when he went down for naptime, not having to hold Poppy but having Poppy hold him, right around his hand. And so Sam would for years. Through the G.I. Joes and the action figure men with heavy plastic musculature that Sam could never find long interest in, Poppy was there, sweet and comforting and he always kind of smelled like Dean, too. Poppy saw sobs and celebrations and even when Sam got to be a little too old for a clown doll and dad kind of wanted Sam to be done with him, Poppy stayed the long stay.

“Do—do you think you could like him?”

Small pills of almost-rain tipped Dean’s lashes, smudged at the peppering of sunny day spots on his nose, and he would have accepted any answer Sam handed him. 

If it was no, the clown would be kicked into the trash by Dean’s own boot. It wouldn’t have mattered all the hopeful, thoughtful work he put in if Poppy upset his little brother. 

A soft exhalation lost in the damp dent between Dean’s shoulder and jaw, in a hug that felt like a hug should, bigger than anything else outside of it and more meant, Sam said, “I already love him.”

“Listo?” The babysitter was done. She was piling their plates with _migas_ and Sam reveled in knowing she’d made a special batch for him, one with the pieces of corn tortilla still a little soft, not so crispy. Sam had Dean, and now Sam also had Poppy. He was listo. “Ven a comer, chicos.”

Dean grabbed hold of Sam’s free, unclowned hand and they ducked into the fry smell of the talavera tiled kitchen. It was all true. Sam loved him very, very much.

4:39 a.m.

The thing he has to do first is find out why there’s a chubby boychild with coil tight short curls and cold, old, colorless harm marks knitted into his skin asleep across from him in the blue bed that has always belonged to Sam’s brother, who is spare and smooth haired with clever, evergreen eyes and extraordinary cheekbones, 6’ 1”. 

A collective hand-me-down of their mother’s looks with a body like a wish.

This boy here, now, is a sight Sam is unfamiliar with and shaped like an asian pear.

He has to wait until after 07:00 when one of the morning techs comes to rouse them for corn chex and fat-free milk to say anything. They get tickets for roving the hallways outside of curfew and even though this feels like a nuclear alarm emergency, Sam doesn’t really want urinal duty for a day.

“Who is that?” he says quietly to Jilly, when she arrives to rap upon their mesh grille window. 

He’s outwardly calm. He knows to be. Answers won’t be given if your apple cheeks are actually maraschino cherries and you sound like a past-life auctioneer. If so, you might be on the brink of what they call an episode. You might also need 1-1 monitoring. Likely you’ll have to wait a day or more before you can find out who fucking stole your big brother. 

“Morning, Sauce,” she says, uncomplicated and socially pleasant. It’s what she’s buddynamed him, Sam Worcestershire, and they aren’t friends but they maybe could’ve been. Outside.

She scoops stray cherub hairs up off her oval face and redoes her ponytail so that it actually looks like a pony’s tail and says, eyeing the new file sitting in the clear plastic chart holder that’s screwed into the wall outside of every room, “Show him to the cafeteria, can you? His name’s Camilo.” Jilly has known Sam long enough to _know_ , and she says, “Just. Give him a chance.”

The digital clock on the night table between the two beds displayed a clear glow in the dark time too early when Sam was yanked awake from a hard doze to discover that the constant center of his small world was replaced by—Camilo, who is still out and kind of smells like earwax, and Jilly moves down to the next door for wake-up without letting him ask the real question.

Jilly’s like that. She doesn’t like to talk to Dean and she doesn’t like to listen to Sam talk about Dean. 

Sam decided some time ago that it’s probably because she has a mildly humiliating crush on Sam’s brother that’s less of a one way street and more fitly a dead end where no signage had ever been posted to warn for it. 

There’s no reason Jilly should have come to expect the snub. She’s cute, for one thing. She is. She’s made up of straw-beige long locks and a little round nose that tips up buttonish. Jilly also has chalk dry wit, a throat coated with a permanent film noir rasp, and a nearly militarized wisdom when it comes to knowing what can and can’t somehow be modified into a form of weapon. Her cups look to be unpadded DDs, for another thing.

All of these key points categorize her as someone, at least when pie charted out, that Dean would at bare-assed minimum round a brow at. The fact that she’s personnel and thus fully prohibited should only heighten her appeal to a heartthrob rebel boy like Dean.

But, and this is true, Dean hasn’t ever made a friendship mural for her or given Jilly a pebble necklace, fashioned out of turquoise rock and a leather cord and soft wire, that he made under supervision during art hour.

So Jilly cold shoulders Dean and, by some extension, Sam—sometimes. There’s no Dean Worcestershire and Sam knew well enough that she’d be little aid in this but the dig of dread that’s settled against his spine didn’t stop to strategize that one out before engaging. He shakes the blue bed with a foot outstretched and says _breakfast_ , resenting, not allowing himself to think yet about how all of Dean’s Dean-things are disappeared, too.

=

7:17 a.m.

It’s a lot like summer camp, Sam has heard people say over the years, both patients and staff—the alternating activities, the evening circle where they sit telling stories, the strict schedules tacked along the walls—and he’s learned to adopt this as part of his jargon. 

Every now and then one of the troubled adolescents from the 6—8 week treatment program will cross his path and Sam will nod a nicety their way within desirable earshot of the clipboard techs who watch and listen and write. It’s good to have plus signs in your columns. A lot of the kids come in to sidestep social backlash, rich and rehabbing, tossed in by parents both concerned and clueless over Colby or Cora’s cocaine nostril. 

So Sam might say in passing, “The library here is almost Carnegie good. Exploit it while you can. You’ll be back to life soon. Don’t worry.”

Dean calls bullshit a lot under his breath and he is, as even a minute older sibling will ceaselessly point out, right about it. 

Sam must’ve poked through every given book in the stacks by now and that’s counting Finnegans Wake and the lovedrip Danielle Steels. Sam knows how to whittle a fine hand-sized rocking pony in theory if not in practice, should he ever find himself in the company of a throwaway hunk of aspen tree and a morakniv spoon knife.

Besides of which is the fact that neither he nor Dean have ever been to anything so suburbia as to passably resemble a place called a _summer camp_. Jesus. They collect werewolf teeth. Pull the sheets off ghosts. It’s known knowledge, if maybe not around this sterility, that Sam and Dean grew up with a machete in place of a mommy, were rocked to sleep by Rob Halford and tucked in with an eavesdropped reading of The Demonology of King James I.

Don’t worry, Sam’s been known to say, and today Sam’s worrying a lot. So much that his eyebrows are probably bordered by red. Dean pointed out a very long time ago how Sam blushes in weird places when he’s crying or about to.

“What are you giving me?” Sam says to the tech who comes by with the three-shelf pill pushcart, who hands him a little clear cup housing one mint green tablet for oral administration, with or without food, 5mg.

“Your haloperidol. Same as yesterday, Sam.” Correct. Sam knows this. Sam still has to ask. He has to make sure that they know. 

Once the tech’s satisfied with the swallow check, he wheels his way down through the rest of the residents, doling out doses and making tick marks in the morning charts. This is sunrise procedure for all those here in Ward C, the mixed disorder unit: you’re woken, you dress, you soap your face and squeak your teeth in the tiny slice of sink and toilet you share with your roomie, and everyone lines up against the hall wall to wait for the drug dispensary to come round. Once done, you head down to first meal.

Sam is many heads above the others and the way this section of the center is set up, four wings of patient lodging that branch off the main nurses station at the hub, he can see most of the residents in the hall opposite, faces drawn and sleep puffed, and the front portion of people in the east and west wings, too, if he scoots a little. Dean is that odd breed of beautiful that can’t help sticking out in any group or gathering or overlit police lineup, and Sam doesn’t see him anywhere.

On the way to the cafeteria, Camilo asks, “What are we looking for?” 

His slippers sweep the flooring in slow shuffles and he has scabs and skin flakes in unexpected places, like in the creasy ditch of his elbow. Some are the size of swinepox and some the size of a pregnant motel roach. Sam forgot he was there.

=

7:43 a.m.

The ‘fruit blend’ Sam selected from today’s menu choices is really just a small uninteresting bowl of peach chunks and honeydew that sits rejected on the bench table he’s at while Sam scans the dining hall for a head the hue of damp sand. 

It’s not as rigid as some people think, in here. Unless you’re one of the ninety-pounders that have assigned meal plans and a caloric content to meet and supervised potty trips in one-hour windows after each consumption, you’re more or less free to choose how and what you eat. Dovine Behavioral Hospital is a state run facility that’s home to those in crisis; clean, cared for, but could do with a coat of paint in some corners. 

Diets are a concern but no one’s going to ring the alarm if someone’s only feeling up for red jello and a cup of water after downing a handful of hard scripts.

Every other Friday, though, the cafeteria offers assorted donut holes (three per patient) and Dean will sometimes trade lozenges or a concealed, working set of nail clippers for an extra sweet or two. He’s resourceful. He doesn’t miss Donut Day.

“What’s bro look like?” Camilo says, when it’s almost time to head to the trash cans. “Like you?”

No, hell. Sam looks low at Camilo, sideways, before logic reminds him that, yes, someone might deductively think that. How persons who share genes usually hold some facial sameness. Someone, who has never seen Dean before and couldn’t know the impossibility in enjoying even minor resemblance with someone like Sam’s brother, might think that. People don’t just look like Dean.

Sam is—a body of bones. He’s unending legs. He used to feel stringy and obvious everywhere he went, uncontainable, but Dean’s almost just as big and next to his brother, Sam doesn’t feel as freakish. As looked at. But then, Dean’s big in other ways that Sam’s not.

“A movie star,” Sam says, still casing out the crowd.

If Dean didn’t come to breakfast at all then that means he’s either somewhere in isolation and a tray is being brought bedside to him—which Sam would have known about because they don’t come quietly in the middle of the night and bind you in the four point cuff system to take you away, pack up all of your crap while your borderline possessive little brother is uncharacteristically out cold. Or Dean’s finally found a rathole to tunnel out of like they’ve always talked about and just left. Without Sam.

Neither makes sound enough sense.

Dean hasn’t gotten any tickets lately, or needed special monitoring. Yesterday Dean was making Sam do a berry pink sidewalk chalk outline of his prone form out by one of the garden’s walking trails.

More importantly, Sam’s sleeps are mostly sleepless. He’s sure he’d have noticed some clangy disruption happening within their small quarters. Unless it’s the new night meds he’s recently been put on. He _did_ coma through a new guest trespassing the room somewhere within the same timeframe.

“We talking young Brando or some sorta studio starlet?” 

Sam stiffens. A few, maybe four or three, were sent here on a kind of converting mission—to curb specific tendencies, addictions to touching builds too similar to their own, addictions to liking to. This world is a glum one. But Camilo’s joking. He thinks they’re looking for a plain face. A regular set of eyes. He must think Sam has some weird worship bias. That Sam’s brother is a troll type, maybe. Well he’ll just have to see.

“Both,” Sam says, not to be funny back but because it’s truth. 

Dean Winchester is something to look at. You don’t have to be into sucking on dick to think so.

Sam carefully entombs the three little glazed balls he procured in a swathe of napkins and skulks them into the pocket of the fallow-white scrub style pants of his patient uniform for a reunion gift. He can’t let Dean miss Donut Day.

Because that last tacked on thought was too stupid to propound. Dean would never leave Sam alone or behind.

=

8:06 a.m.

If you’re halfway to seven feet tall, you can sometimes see into places you shouldn’t. High up, should be out of reach places. 

On his way to his room to hide away the stolen treats, Sam passes one of the treatment labs that doesn’t require standing on his stilt-toes to look in. Dean could be right in there. It’s part of Sam’s natural mechanics to check, in case, to hollow out the known world and turn over whatever grains of dust and dirt remain. To check. In case. 

There’s a man with Cushing’s disease getting warned for flapping at a nurse’s hand when she makes to readjust the tubing hooked to him, feeding him electrolytes. Dean doesn’t have a buffalo hump. 

Dean has baby-freckles splotched on his shoulders and a congenital capability that’s unmistakable, shown right through in his stare, in the unafraid way he’ll walk up to any given devil and throw a wager in alongside his fastened smile. Sam walks quicker through the strong ammonia scenting the med corridors. 

=

8:22 a.m.

“When I’m feeling down or low, I’ll focus on remembering who I am and visualize who I’m going to be,” is the motto of the day, which everyone repeats like chorus crickets.

This is actually a botchy regurgitation from an Iron Maiden song and Sam picks this out like a true kid raised on thrash but he’s polite enough to not point out the flub. Also he doesn’t care.

Dean would care. Dean would be an amusing medley of impressed and offended at this casual abomination, _you hearin’ this shit, Sam?_

Community class is one of the only meets that everyone on this floor is obligated to attend, at this set specific time. At conclusion, the residents will disperse and move on to their assigned activities or meet with their social workers or try conning one of the greener aides into giving up a longneck root beer they brought in with their lunch and novicely left peeking a little out of an insulated sack. 

There’s no worry over anyone trying to break the drink open and plunge a frantic shard into their femoral, it’s a plastic 20 oz. Glass bottles aren’t allowed anywhere on premises. And the hospital only provides decaf to inpatients. Soda’s almost as good as a pouch of Crown for some, the sugar shock. 

Luxuries are little and smattered.

In the room full of metal chairs, Dean isn’t here either.

Sam isn’t claustrophobic but he’s had enough training to know that if you can, you take an aisle seat. Extra life points if it’s close to a potential exit. Doorway, wide vent. Even though the windows are barred for the patients’ own protection, Sam finds himself a nice seat set on the margin of the group, angled towards the long, polycarbonate panes at the rear, quietest, where he can form a plan.

“Can I—” Camilo waves a heedful hand to the seat next to Sam, like the stone look on Sam’s face is telling him exactly why it’s empty and exactly who it’s for. At half past, Sam knows Dean isn’t coming. He doesn’t approve but he doesn’t oppose so Camilo sits down, says, “I’ll help you look some more later,” like they’re in a spy novel and a guy with a rosebud pout is their reconnaissance operation.

The outer bends of Sam’s ears scald. Even though he didn’t—tell Camilo that. He didn’t describe his brother’s _mouth_ to some dude who keeps crab-pinching his arm pudge. Sam wonders if it’s dermatillomania.

“What are you in for?”

Sam’s ankle winds around the cool steel of the chair leg.

This isn’t barbed wire max, he wants to say. We have Connect Four tournaments and relaxing bird sounds when we’re spooling out anxious. Nobody’s cutting sideways deals with underpaid guards or turning boy ass into boy pussy.

Camilo’s pretty talkative for someone Sam watched gobble up a decently serious dosage of what looked to be labeled pimozide this morning. 

Timmy T. used to take that. He lived in the room across from Sam and Dean, constantly caught napping when he shouldn’t have been. His name wasn’t Tim or Timothy but everyone called him that and he answered to it. He had motor and vocal tics that had nothing at all to do with his craze. He was sometimes a real bitch but the man was likable. 

“I killed someone with an eight inch bowie,” Sam says, quietly non-disruptive and sketching a rough blueprint of the grounds on the paper he’s supposed to be writing his daily goals on. It’s a lie and it’s not. Other times he used a portion of manila rope, a bone cutter, a .22 pistol. And they were somethings not someones. But it’s not why Sam’s here. Still though, it should give him a little leg room, some distance from the shadow act here so he can jot and plot and figure out his next move.

Camilo says, “oh, nice,” and “I read about this case where the guy sawed off a woman’s foot and kept it in his freezer to periodically put high heels on. To model the shoes for him while he wanked it.” He must think, bizarrely, that this is the thread that’ll knit them together. Warm Sam to him. It kind of is. “Didn’t he just die?”

Yes. That was a fixture in the newspapers recently. 

Sam ignores this, and ignores the notion that scabby Camilo thinks Sam’s just fucking around. 

The meet ends with a recount of the facility’s regulations for any newcomers: personal grooming and hygiene care are to be done on your own time, between programs or after last therapy, but they are to be done. “Daily,” Jilly adds from the hall, passing past the open door; only one pillow per person unless you have your doctor’s written order; no entering resident rooms that aren’t your own without express supervision or approval by a tech; and if you’re confused about anything, ask.

Sam folds his crude map up like a small airplane and then into his scooped shirt pocket. If it’s discovered, it might just look like the paperfolding art they tried teaching them last month. He’s seen a lot of found origami hearts floating in the trash.

=

9:30 a.m.

A is for Altruism. It says so up on the blackboard in square block letters at Sam’s first workshop of the day.

He guesses it’s supposed to be some sister of catharsis, this exercise. Anonymously putting a problem you’re experiencing or a hurdle you can’t leap down on paper, crumpling it down, and instead of throwing it away, all the problems get placed in a magician’s hat to be mixed before the teacher-tech pulls one out at a time and the rest of the group tries to come up with tenable solutions for each. Answers are spat out at will and up for discussion so this way it’s less invasive than being spotlight selected. Also it gives everyone a rounded out sense of efficacy and can count for a check mark in the socialization box on your daily chart. Therapists don’t want to see Xs.

_I don’t know how to be alone_ , Sam thinks, starting to count some of the weedy hairs around his wrist that he likes to smooth out until it’s all laid uniformly flat, combed out by his thumbnail before Dean will come along, see what weirdo shit he’s doing and backsweep Sam’s work wildly against the grain, say, if you act crazy, they’re gonna think you’re crazy.

He ends up writing the mini confession on his scrap of grid paper but doesn’t finish it off by writing ‘and neither does he.’ He doesn’t write ‘My brother is missing. Call 911.’ 

One of today’s miseries is unbunched to say, “My wife hasn’t come to Family Hour in three weeks and I can’t tell if that means we’re divorced or she’s dead. I’m not sure which one I want it to be,” and a woman in front calls out _new penis_ , which makes another lady two rows back start sermoning about the futility of long-term attachment and phony, commercialized emotions that are taught and not felt. The wife has become a guest at the city morgue, a frolicking harlot, and a censorship issue in a little over two minutes. Someone else says they slept with their married math teacher when they were fifteen or so, some time in the late seventies, just to try white meat. Tech blows a silver coach’s whistle, says _next problem_. Mr. Waltson who has checked himself into the unit on three separate occasions threatens to take a shit on the floor. 

Sam fades all further dialogue out, chewing his breadcrumb thoughts.

If he can get to a fire alarm and successfully yank it, everyone has to go out to the lawns. It’ll be a fly swarm of tumult but he’ll see where they’re taking Dean when it’s time to go back in. 

He’s asked about his brother three times this morning, thought _where the fuck is he_ and said _Have you seen Dean Winchester?_ , thought _where are you keeping him_ , said, “Okay, um. Thanks. If you see him, can you tell him Sam said. Hi.”

=

11:51 a.m.

“Oh, a little spike today.”

Jilly squinches the blood pressure cuff off his arm and puts his numbers into her notebook, into the system. The B and V keys get stuck a lot so Jilly has to go back multiple times to error correct while she’s typing in her comments and she asks in that aseptic tone she uses when she’s trying to be distant, when she’s not asking Sauce what his favorite Hitchcock work is once she’s come back in from her cig break, if Sam’s feeling okay.

It seems to Sam that someone might be able to look over at him and fine that in this stilled moment his brainpan feels neatly nestled between the jowls of a scrap metal compactor that’s compressing and liquefying and soon the top of him will just pop right off, skull, hair. But maybe he’s a mystery yet.

The Marvelous Mercurial Samuel, sideshow performer. 

“Stressed, I guess.” Sam feels out the divots in a knee. “I still. I still haven’t been able to find—”

“How about your head, Sam? Any strain or disorient?” Okay. Yeah. This is his cue to take. He’s Sam, only, and she’s Jill Jewett, only, and reminder: this isn’t outside and they aren’t friends. He shakes his head. He’s fine. “Groggy?” Again. “Can you read out loud those letters there on the third row but backwards.” Sam can. In medieval latin, too, if she wants. She doesn’t, thank you, maybe tomorrow. 

“Chest pains?” she asks, sliding the cone thermometer into his ear, watching him, eyes cut close. Yeah, he thinks. So bad. 

“No,” he says, looking at her M-shaped top lip and wondering if Dean’s ever wondered over it, “nothing,” because he doubts his are the kind she’s meaning. He gets a multivitamin that’s shaped like a Haribo bear, though.

=

12:04 p.m.

There’s a pull station by the Visitor’s Welcome Center, a couple of feet to the left of the STAFF ONLY door, and it’s closest to where he’s at currently, but ultimately harder to get to. Plus the one set next to the old scullery that’s no longer in use and utilized only as a storage area for bedpans and extra linens, a laundry cart with two busted wheels, waterproof bed sheets, has the most promise. 

That one, though, is off the end of the south hall and he’ll have to pass directly in front of the hub in order to get there.

Techs keep a careful watch on who’s where and when and why, and Sam has no noted business out that far, especially this close to lunch. That isn’t where his room is and if he’s heading to someone else’s. Well. Fucking is definitely against the rules here. _This is a hospital, not a brothel_. A handjob was caught on camera a week ago and now one of the teeny bulimic chicks has mopping rounds for the next two weeks. It’s unfair, really, because she’s not the one who spooged the side of the water fountain. What’d she even get out of that? Maybe a senna compound. Still uncool.

Yeah, you know skinny minnie wasn’t about swallow, Dean said last Wednesday, chuckly. Dean’s an asshole. Sam misses him so much. It hasn’t been half a day yet.

Sam isn’t fucking anyone, god, but what’s the non-red-flag way to say that? South hall is out for now.

Only other accessible pull is beside the main exit that all of the residents take to go outdoors to exercise on the grass or count roly-polies or—whatever else. It’s a heavily monitored door. Sam, soothing himself and plucking a few hairs out from his temple like Dr. Ortiz urges not to do, could use a sit in the quiet room with the meditational bird sounds audio, the magpies or the thrushes, turtle doves. The woodpecker’s needling ruckus has already been at the edge of his eardrum all day. 

=

12:12 p.m.

He’s going to rest, just for a few minutes, just to think. Sift through some thoughts until something settles a little closer to the front. He’s going to fall back on his flat mattress and look for purposeless patterns up in the popcorn ceiling, try to figure out which derangement he can capitalize on quickest. 

Who he can barter with, haggle meds or favors, to run and pull the red alarm and stay mum after, at the lowest cost to Sam. Sam tries to stay unnoticed, no trouble, nondescript; normal. But having a brother like Dean means Sam’s learned how to be slippery, how to cut a deal, to get it done clean.

Sometimes it’s easiest to have someone else leaving the mud tracks. 

The punishments don’t come in as harsh to the legitimate lunatics because some people are just—floridly psychotic, and you can’t really condemn souls for eating a third of the pages out of the public bible when they’ve been receiving midnight texts from Methuselah for the last two years. 

Most of them are chock-full of mood stabilizers and other countermeasures at this time of day anyway. 

Lars would probably do it if Sam let him look at his feet, the naked lengths, the bows and arcs of them, and he would definitely do it if he got to touch Sam’s toes, the in betweens, too, but Sam would rather exhaust all other options first, really. He hasn’t walked around barefoot since Lars moved in and started scrubbing the side of his black-haired hand against where his dickhead would be through the pants every time Sam was somewhere socklessly near.

That short hybristo kid is an option. Sam thinks. And then Sam thinks, no. No. And a diagonal thought, anyone with homicidal ideations is also out. They’d probably set flames to another just to trigger the fire bell, and there’re wide slips of shadow under his door, he sees on approach, smooth and steady motion that might— It’s reactive, his throwing it open so it clangs.

It isn’t Dean, like the dirt-skid skip in his heart wanted to think.

“Should I go get someone?” Sam says, stepping in, eyes thrown around to amass damages, thinking he should probably just go grab a tech now, thinking he won’t have further think time now, “for—” 

“I can’t find my cream,” Camilo says. His voice is vague and obscure. On palms and shins, he’s partway under his bed, digging. “Did you see where they put it?” 

The room’s half eviscerated while Camilo keeps clamping and chafing his thighs, taking timeouts from his scour to scratch footlong regions of his body. The wastebasket that's emptied out on the floor has been picked and pulled through, and a couple of crossword puzzle books along with a jar of hemorrhoid pads and some other uncomfortably intimate things are lackadaisically strewn about, glaring and a little grisly, and Camilo looks about to itch himself into oblivion when he says, pulling himself up, “I had a whole tube at sign-in and this place doesn’t confiscate—”

“I’m going to break your arm,” Sam says, soft. 

“—not if it’s your own prescribed stuff, do—they. What—?”

Poppy, smiling customarily, doesn’t look happy to be sitting mashed inside one of Camilo’s beefpatty fists. 

“Oh. Is this. It’s so cool and old timey. Did you—make this guy?” Camilo says, briefly forgetting his itches, holding it over, his hand out for Sam to take the dingy little sock that’s been loved for so long, and Sam does, of course, thrumming with blood clots behind his eyes, snatches him back and knows he can’t ever even hint to Dr. Ortiz what almost went down here, the incident reports that would have stated how he just kept on hitt—Sam crushes Poppy to his breastbone, shoves him inside his shirt and goes to lunch. 

First Dean, now this. Sam’s breath sounds like an engine whistle. You can’t leave anybody alone around here anymore.

=

12:36 p.m.

Dean doesn’t show up to second meal and Sam thinks about asking for a sedative later.

Dean left while Sam was nodded out. Maybe if he sleeps and stirs again, the abduction of his brother will have been solved. Dean will have just snuck out for a day of leave, to the Titty Tavern where brunch specials are $8 and crotch rides last the length of a lovesong, to the farmers market to bring back a small bag of organic nectarines for Sam, smuggled up his arm sleeve somehow, smudge of wax-red by the unshaven corner of his soft mouth, his hard grin, aw Sammy, were you worried?

It’s the casserole day of the week and he stabs at his elbow noodles, lines up four peas to impale on his fork prongs. He doesn’t mind the lunch jabber so much. It relieves him a little from thinking about the sounds that should be coming in from his left, observations, burps. Sam sips tart fruit punch.

“Look, I don’t. I didn’t know it was—” Camilo sits five seats down on the opposite side of the mostly emptied longtable, bending a bendy straw in quarter sections, looking at Sam but not. He says, “sorry for it,” and seems sorry for it.

Sam’s piled most of the ground meat off to one side of his tray, on account of it looking either raw or charred or too much mush. He has very little kindnesses to give today. “You’re fucking cleaning the room,” Sam says, and spoons a clump of confetti cake into his mouth. Camilo nods and shuts the hell up.

=

2:02 p.m.

This room of the hospital is crowded with couches and cushions and little mock cactuses in little clay cups. A radio is on in the corner but it’s only as loud as a lullaby. It’s just for atmosphere.

They’re allowed a half hour each, per day, to use the provided phones. You can call your grandmother or your primary doc’s office or a cab rental if you’re getting discharged soon; you can’t call the governor or the po-po or any of the racy 900 lines. All the circuits are monitored. There’s a long list of non dial-out numbers. Sam picks up a receiver and presses 785-555-0179, and waits.

There’s cold excitement sitting in his lower gut like a limestone, despite knowing it’ll be null.

Dean isn’t going to answer, and he doesn’t, and Sam knew that. But he still hangs up and dials it a few more times just to hear Dean’s mail greeting, the static sound of his voice saying his own name. 

It’s going to be really embarrassing when Dean comes back and has to listen to Sam coo a recount of the most banal inflections in Dean’s delivery of certain words, like leave and message and see ya, and Sam will tell him all of this—because there’s nothing he doesn’t share with Dean, they have a ban on secrets. Sam will say, _it was ten hours_ —he looks at the minute hands on the wall clock— _nine hours and forty-eight minutes and I thought I was experiencing a low grade STEMI heart attack._

Sam calls one more time and says after the beep, “one in the box, one in the bush.” He hangs up before he can say anything incriminating, or tender.

=

2:44 p.m.

They get four choices: foreign, black and white, PG-13, or cartoon. 

It’s part of the ‘partnership program’ which is just the center’s way of saying that it’s fun to have friends. Making connections doesn’t have to be a bumpy road, guys. 

Everyone gets a vote on what to watch and the staff will supply healthy snacks, 3-D glasses sometimes, and after, the film is considered and critiqued and the underlying objective will always be to get the patients to locate a string of wisdom or a motivational aspect, something they can take away with them for further reflection, even though all anyone’s really waiting for are the risque bits, like when they watched _Aimée & Jaguar_ last month, subtitled, and someone commandeered the remote when a tech stepped out, and kept rewinding the first bedroom scene between the girls, the blonde’s nipple showing delicately through her slip, her shy shuddering, all that sensation.

Sam actually enjoys the veggie crisps and the mixed nuts and today it’s _My Life as a Dog_ that’s on and he is sitting cooperatively in his seat and he is munching on his granola bar but the only thing he’s taking away from this is that one brother is cruel to the other and the two boys have to be separated. 

Fifteen minutes before it ends a nonverbal resident has an outburst, starts whopping himself in the stomach, not insubstantial strands of mucilage draining his nostrils out, webby, and they have to call for a code team. 

The movie keeps playing but everyone else is paused, watching the friend they made through Cinema Collaboration Class get chemically restrained.

=

4:04 p.m.

Sam supervises the process. He sits at the center of his bed with his rudely long legs pulled up, knees barbed up to his chin, and watches Camilo tidy the place.

The tipped chairs, the imitation calla lilies stemmed upright in the vase Dean made from cardboard and twine. He refits the sheets.

“Here it is, look, oh damn, here,” his voice squeezes out of him, high. He’s waving a fat paperback and spreading it open at its natural gape for Sam to see, where it’s been held at a stretch by a silly thing of numbing ointment which has been squashed and squeezed and made hair-thin in parts, a good bookmarker.

Camilo doesn’t mind the audience, unscrews the cap and starts applying the gelled lotion liberally.

Sam glances at the novel cover—twisty, stuck out hair, blue stars sunk in sockets, the bone face, highshine bulby red nose—with contempt. Not for the book, not really, but.

Sam says, “Pennywise isn’t actually a clown at all,” and nothing else, so it might be that he’s throwing puny punches and walking on top of somebody who’s just tripped in front of him instead of helping them up but it doesn’t feel like he’s being petty enough when he remembers poor Poppy having been all fingered and fluffed, handled by hands Sam wouldn’t trust to ever—

It’s not the meanest thought he’s had, the hope that he spoiled a surprise or two.

But Camilo’s read and re-read this one and only agrees chirpily with Sam, starts talking fairy tale lit, suspense lit, sharing, which is a backfire Sam could’ve done with avoiding. Poppy is warm against Sam’s clavicle, and Camilo straightens the shelving section, restuffs the hamper while Sam is busy wondering who boxed up all of Dean’s belongings.

“Are there others?” 

Done and sweating and sitting on a small stool by the heavy oak bureau each room shares, he looks to Sam.

“There are others, right?” he says, and Sam is flattened by suspicion of what all he saw, what he must’ve seen in his unshoveling. “Like—” Camilo chins at the little felt hat poking up out of Sam’s shirt.

It has something to do with the walk here, probably, how Camilo came to intercept him next to the supply cubby to walk the rest of the way to the room, pointing out this boy or that boy and saying, “Is this him?” or “How about that one over there?”, while gesturing at femme little redheaded things or unsettlingly pretty types with chicken plucked eyebrows and oversquared jaws, and it made Sam almost laugh, go, “no, no, that’s not,” and “Dean’s face isn’t subtle. But look for standout shoulders first.” It’s something in there that makes him say,

“No,” because nothing comes close to the first. “Not like.” Poppy fears nothing, beams through his life. “But yeah, there are others.” Many others. 

The free hour goes by like a spinny swirl, like flying out wild, and there’s a nudge of guilt going down his throat wrong, that he’s not yet evacuating the hospital and bulldozing every brick until he’s found his brother but Camilo’s quick interest distracts him, his thrill with Sam kneeling to the bottom last drawer in the dresser and lifting the corners of the neat creased blankets, letting him see, letting him say, “Is it okay if I—” and Sam nodding because he doesn’t mind with these, this time it’s fine, these guys are different.

Camilo holds a funny ceramic one with a green top-hat and patterned suspenders, says, “how about this? It came from a nursing home, yeah?”

Sam has stories to tell for each, has been regaling him, a little, with their origins.

Sam eyes him, but it feels cautiously friendly and he says, “No,” slowly. “Antique shop in Stockbridge when I was ten. Saw him three times that trip, through the window. Dean stole him for me.”

It feels, in a measure, wrong. A little bit bad. 

Like it might feel to not just let a person take a look at the interior crotch patch of your recently discarded underwear, but to flip them inside out and show them yourself. That skintight type of private, and Camilo’s enthusiasm means he’s scooted in real near, but Sam allows for this, nods and shrugs and appreciates the careful hold the guy extends to each hoist and thorough turnover inspection, a distinct delight for Sam’s things.

“Um,” Sam has to think, when Camilo holds up a rainbow jester with one missing button over the nose, but it comes to him. They all do. “Theater prop. Ninth grade.”

They go through them like the show and tell system, the wind-up patchwork one, who has the worst scuffing from the hard-luck neighborhood Sam found him in, and the one made colorfully through crochet, the Amtoy musical classic plush, the wooden marionette wearing polkadot legs and striped arms, big lion yellow hair. Camilo spends extra time with a thumb puppet who has yoinky strings in his body and twists and warps and dances and doubles over when you push down on his base and Sam tells him how he came from a yard sale for a buck ten that Dean picked the lint out of his pockets to find.

Storytime starts only tolerably, before it becomes an unexpectedly voluptuous feeling, the confiding, and Sam’s collector’s pride swells.

The old tin jack in the box never pops out when Camilo tries but that’s because Sam doesn’t teach him the trick that very dated toys like this will often have. He does tell him, though, that he came from somewhere between Texas towns and he was hard to hide in a Chevy trunk where dad wouldn’t see.

“Are they all hims?” Camilo asks, holding a small stuffed one in his lap, looking down at it. “You keep calling—” 

That one is specific to Sam’s shaping, won at a pop-up carnival that Dean drove them to with Sam on his bike bars, Sam thirteen and twitchy and mortified by any simple touch, and this was the megaprize at the water shooting saloon game where Dean trampled targets to present Sam with the dopey little dude with a red rope mouth and stamped hearts for cheek blush, and Sam had thought that day, that evening, that his real prize hadn’t been the soft sweetheart at all. Sam’s sweetheart was softer.

“Yeah,” Sam says, saying exactly what he’s—saying. He wouldn’t deny it. “They always are.”

Camilo helps him, carefully and considerately, to put away his clown collection while they hatch a treehouse style plan. It involves blocking the cameras and holding lookout. It’s almost time for dinner in here. 

=

5:16 p.m.

**Picnic Party in the Park!**

It hadn’t interested him very much before, aside from the angle of getting out. Away from this place. Road noise and an uncensored Americana. Kind of.

It isn’t bad here but a chimp wouldn’t necessarily choose a glass habitat if the door was left unlatched and on the other side was the grassy woods full of conquerable branches, even if you do try to fool it by placing a platter of pears and eggs inside the enclosure. Unless it’s a lifer.

Some here are. A taste of freedom or to be reformed for responsibility isn’t something everyone wants.

Sam takes notice of the neon flyer tacked to the community corkboard in the day room today, though, stands around to study it over, thinking. **1:00 to 4:00, sack lunches supplied, music, nature study, photography souvenirs, B-Y-O-sunscreen**. Even if it is just a polaroid relic and a crazy people field trip, Dean still would’ve leapt at the outing. It’s two afternoons from now.

Good behavior residents get rewards like this monthly. So long as you’ve stuck to your medication regimen and have your check marks in the right columns, you’re a go. Dean better be back by Sunday.

=

5:53 p.m.

Chili stew with bread rolls and a double portion side of slaw. Blue gelatin topped stingily with a dollop-tip of whip from a can. Lemonade or tea. A square of sweet rice treat unless you’re detoxing.

“He’s not really your brother, is he?”

Sam was just swirling around some beans but he stops so suddenly it splashes the low bowl rim. He looks at Camilo no longer five seats down, says what too sharp, the t too pointed.

“No. I mean. Hey, I’m not gonna care. Promise,” but it’s overlapped with Sam’s hissing protests, _he is, yes he is_ , Sam’s pulse flying, “I just meant. The way you talk about him.”

“What, like idolism?”

Sour. He can’t help that he’s puppy trailed Dean through all his paths, that his eyes are a little shot through with stars when Dean can gunspin a revolver better than Josey Wales even. Kid awe comes with the turf.

“No, I.” Camilo mashes his wheat roll onto his plate, then starts breaking off chunks. “You’re not with him?”

“Not—” not like. That.

“Oh, well that’s.”

“He’s my best friend,” Sam says, the cafeteria crowd blurring before him strangely. He scrubs a hand over his face and it clears. Today has been a hundred hours long. “My brother’s my best friend, okay.”

=

6:20 p.m.

Artful Activities is next on Sam’s schedule and it starts in five.

Generally enjoyable, it’s an annoyance to sit through the starts and the finishes of it with its underlying aura of an open discussion AA meeting, is anybody new here? Who wants to pick a starting point to see where our creativity might take us today? 

A table is set up in the back for 'refreshments' afterwards, mint discs and unsalted pretzels. Sam has never stood to say, “I’m Sam,” say what brought him here.

There’s a no shouting rule that they try to enforce as much as they can—let’s all just settle, shh, quieter, we’ll work through it with you—but they’re more tolerant about letting this one slide because no two patients are identically linear and a lot of the time, no one patient is even exactly who they were the day before, and this can cause a lot of confusion and grief, and a tantrum is different from a torment. 

It’s preferable that nobody’s just standing around screaming but sometimes when you’re on your way to piece together a consciousness collage or paint your emotions and you see your older brother just over at the vending machine set up for staff usage, hacking into it with a combination of the star and the pound buttons switched up at intervals like you’ve seen him do on special occasions, the holler might happen the way a first hiccup does, no blocking it off.

“Dean,” Sam says. It’s a scrape of sound that comes out like the ##*#***# code but it’s loud. 

Dean and a trio of others all turn his way, but three faces wear irritation and one does not.

It might be that Sam’s legs have matured even further, ripened him right up to the ceiling where it feels like his head has got to be touching, or it could just be that he’s so fast, so, so fast, but Dean hasn’t gotten to finish entering his selection and robbing the machine of a chocolate nut bar and Sam’s there and on him, all over him, fuck the no touching policy, nose in Dean’s fuzzy short hair.

“Wow, shit. I missed you, too,” Dean says, after one full minute of a hug, holding on and not scoffing or calling Sam a wussy, drumsticking his fingers comfortingly up Sam’s goosebumped neck.

Regular hugs don’t last all that long, if you think about it. Maybe five to ten seconds and then it’s back-pat and break, and twenty is true affection. If you set a timer and let it run to sixty and just stay silently inside the hug, a bodywrap hug, it’s actually a length of time that people can start to get uncomfortable with. One minute.

Sam pitches Dean into the shadow where the appliance is humming and lets this one go on past two.

“I thought—” Sam swallows and sighs at the same time and it chokes him and Dean says,

“I know.” He’s a good hugger who taught Sam how to.

Sometimes the hugs Sam’s seen aren’t even done in full—do they count? Just one side of each torso touching and an impersonal jostle or such. They’re more real at certain places and times, like airports and train stations and funerals, but that’s sort of because you’re operating on the idea that this person might be crossed out of the world and you won’t see them again even though the odds of that are one in fifty-five thousand and one in one point one million, respectively, or they’ve just returned and now you’re free from thinking so pathologically. 

Or they were that one-in statistic and now everyone veiled and suited up black are hugging hugs that are real but awful. Weddings might do okay hugs but that’s hard to say.

Neither of them have seen one before.

This hug kind of feels to Sam like all of those types of hugs together and Dean is whispering now _c’mon man, they’re starting to stare_ but he isn’t fidgeting and his voice is flirted and Sam laughs, lets go but only a little. He keeps his pinky twisted to Dean’s.

“Okay, where the fuck did they—” Sam says.

It clashes poorly with the tech who’s doing additional med rounds saying, “Winchesters have some place to be, don’t they?” and arching her little pencil brows at them as she teeters her cart down the corridor.

The art lady is standing at the doorway to the classroom, pointedly waiting for the two of them to join the group.

Her head’s a maze of cool looking braids, long and tiny thin, and Sam says, “I’m sorry, ma’am, but you must be a real screwball yourself. Look what I found. I only just got him back. We’re not going in there,” ticket us, tell Dr. Ortiz, or—he’s meaning to, it’s crowding up at his palate, but when Dean tugs on his little finger, Sam’s tethered to it. 

He eats back his insubordination and hides his gall behind a neutered, apologetic nod.

He walks and follows and goes to do art shit with Dean.

Sam’s spine has uncurled. 

Mrs. Mabel, the old doll in for poisoning two husbands with sugardust sprinkles of arsenic in their morning muffins, remarks on his striking dimples when they take their seats, my goodness.

=

7:17 p.m.

“How’d we all make out today?” 

The woman with the braids and the pearl stud earrings, an enlivening sort. Helpful.

Innocent things can be altered with very minor effort put in, especially when you live somewhere where contact is considered a crime and patients, at least the ones who still feel sexual at all, might trade their valued capsules for even a little molestation, and especially, too, when you’re sometimes absently treated like a child and start to act like one. Also when you’re twenty-three and your dick started hardening twenty minutes ago for no reason that you can find and god, you’re just happy.

Someone answers her, “second base ain’t bad but a homerun makes a mess,” some rednecky guy battling Othello syndrome. The room titters, a few wolfman whistles, an _ew shut up, Randy_. 

But now Sam’s thinking about it.

And he’s looking.

Again.

Sam could draw the right side of Dean’s face from stored memory, trace out the plunges and bumps and dips of his profile, his barfight nose that came natural that way, wet blonde spun through the tips of his illogically long eyelashes, the shady patch just under the bottom lip’s vermillion border that never sees sun because the pink above it is just so full, cruelly full—

She says, tutting the room, _hush that talk_ , coming around the desks, “let’s see ‘em. Who’s a Monet?”

Blot art, this evening. White construction paper and two different colored bottles of tempera paint put out on each tabletop at the start, and each table seats three or four, so you have to share and trade around and say, “please can you hand me the blue?” or, “I’m not using this. Anyone need?”

Sam cordially ignored the other pair sat with them, milked out a bunch of the yellow, squirted a dot of blue, stirred, reassessed, another blob of ocean. When he was satisfied with his mixture, Sam let the drips fall to one half of the page, spaced out, before going back and nicking in a few more, smaller and fainter and more spread. He laid the blank half over the dotted half and pressed carefully, like the lady had said to, but not too much or you’ll ruin it, baby your work.

He figured Dean, for his inkblot, would draw a big sensual circle with a darker, littler circle at the center, and fold the other half over, open it, call it Composition 2. It would be breast implants.

But when Sam looks over again, Dean’s sheet of paper hasn’t been decorated. He didn’t feel like painting today, Sam supposes. It’s just white blank but—his face isn’t. And Sam's curious, he wonders embarrassingly how long Dean’s been doing the stare thing at him. 

It feels adoring, and hot, and lightly contemplative, and Sam can usually feel it when Dean’s checking him out but not today either.

“What?” Sam says, rubs at his nose. “Do I—”

“And yours is?” Sam’s turn now. She picks up his not-dry little masterpiece and rotates it between her fingertips a few times, tries to guess. “Stars in an alien sky? Ladybug shell? No. 101 Dalmatians?” Oh my god. “Is it—a field of good luck shamrocks?” Dean’s interested to know now, too.

“Sunlight exposure to the skin,” Sam says, feeling nauseated by the attention. “UV. You know.”

“It’s freckles?” Nobody else is minding any of this. They’re illustrating and chatting and doing Rorschach tests on each other. Sam bites the fat in his cheek, says yes. She says, “Green...freckles?”

“Yes.” Yes. That’s what its gallery name would be. 

**Sam Winchester** (b. 1983)  
**_Green Freckles_** , 2006  
Paint on paper/Heart on sleeve  
9 x 12 inches

_It’s an urgent green and there’s a lot of them._

When she’s indulgently complimented his vision and strolled away to the next artiste, Sam gets a hard kick under the table and a narrowed flat look spoiled by a slowdance of a smile. Dean doesn't move his foot, where it's hooked around Sam’s, until it’s time to file out.

=

8:42 p.m. 

There ought to be traffic cones and road flares lit like fireworks on the floor. Disaster sirens and yellow tape and a sheet covering a body that everyone’s trying not to look at but can’t help but see.

All that heralds the discrepancy, though, is a dung beetle inching across the tile of their room, half stepped on.

“Whoa,” Dean says, when he means what the fuck. He’s doing the blinking thing he denies doing when something’s knocked him for six, for seven. The wide tooth comb and the apple blossom quilt someone’s nan made, the aloe wipes, the homey touches from a home neither of them knows. 

He jabs an elbow into Sam’s gut, grins around a “You moved on quick,” that lands weird, on its back.

“Shut up,” Sam mumbles, trying for a muscleless punch back, trying to fake that it’s funny so Dean doesn’t feel even worse, so they both don’t, but this place is a new place now, for now, and Sam says, “you know I had nothing to do with—” that Dean waves off and yeah yeahs, he knows Sam can’t control the facility’s housing, knows it wasn’t up to him at all.

Dean won’t go to the other side of the room, not while it looks like that. He doesn’t say it but he sits on Sam’s familiar bed and molds his back to the wall, watches Sam go perpendicular so he’s sitting close but can still see Dean’s face, can still drag his fingers around Dean’s ankle, over and under the knot of it in the way that’s always calmed him much better than tranq. 

“Where did they take you?” They don’t have long before the next line in the agenda and Sam needs to know, _what did they do? How did you get back? Were you scared? Were you as scared as me?_ “Why were you gone so long?”

“I was just moved, I guess,” Dean says. He doesn’t look especially wan, or maltreated. There aren’t any burst capillaries in or near his eyes. 

“To the east wing?” It’s got the closest double doors that lead out to the high risk unit so they’ll sometimes put the more excitable of the residents that way, just as an exigency protocol. There’s always more available housing over there. It’s drafty and racks up complaints.

“Nah, just down the hall.”

“What? No. I looked.” I was distraught. I was ready to start a massacre. “I looked during morning line up. I mean. Dean, I looked all day—”

“Secure treatment area for a while. Pretty sure I snoozed half my life off,” Dean says but like he’s exhausted still and he fixes a tendril of fraying orange hair where Poppy’s napping pleasantly on the pillow. 

Dean says, “But I thought about.” His eyes will talk but he’ll never say it. He never has. Not the way Sam wants him to. He fixes Sam’s yarn hair, too, secures a helplessly tangled chunk behind one of Sam’s ears, Sam thinking _please_ , Sam thinking _kiss me_. “A lot.” 

“Me too,” Sam says, not above how concentrated it sounds when it’s like this, whispering when they don’t have to out of cold survival. 

“So,” Dean says, voice hardly nailed down at all. He’s looking, once, at Sam’s mouth that Sam’s left slightly, invitingly open, and then he isn’t. “So,” Dean says, “that was that.”

Sam can’t be satisfied by a shrug.

Why did they barge in while Dean was at rest and decide he needed aid so abruptly, in the silence, come in, pack him up, pack up all his stuff, take him to what sounds like a quarantine sector, even if it wasn’t, even if it’s just where they have the sundry jars and the cold packs and spirometers.

A gagging thought comes up Sam’s sternum like carsickness. “Do you. Was it because—do you think they suspected—?”

He’s ready for Dean’s face to flood fire, stain up his nose and neck when he realizes Sam’s stuttering over saying the night thing, the thing we do, the thing where you leave your blue bed for mine because I ask you to, because I make you, because three feet is too far and I can’t hear the sounds your stomach makes from over there, or feel how big you can get when you’re crowded against the small of my back. But Dean’s skin is just silk, colored creamily.

“No, I don’t,” he’s thinking, and Sam’s trying not to. “I was in my bed. And got taken anyway.”

“How, though? How? I was sleeping, not flatlined.”

“I don’t know, Sam. I was here, then not, then got up starving and now find you shacking up with someone who does sudoku and I can’t just—tell you what I don’t know. I—”

Sam doesn’t want to argue. Dean’s unnerved, too, and it’s just about time to get up for more mindfulness exercises, observe your environment. They’ll figure shit out. I’m sorry, Dean. Someone here has a small cuckoo clock that goes off a few rooms down, marking the hour.

“Wait,” Sam says, before they go. “I.” 

Unrolling the misshapen napkin he’d faithfully squirreled away just this contaminated morning, he’s shamed to see they look oily and fused together. They look foolish. He didn’t think it’d take this long to find Dean, “they were probably a lot better, um, before” and it’s okay if Dean rejects them, he just, Sam probably wouldn’t want them either anymore. “You don’t have to—”

Dean’s eyes round. At Sam’s cupped hands and at Sam, and he goes and takes two down the gullet. He smears the flaky glaze left on his fingers in a stripe over Sam’s indignant mouth and it tastes so good even when Sam can’t find the flavor of the donuts at all.

=

9:05 p.m.

Community closure wraps up the day.

This is the time to go over any concerns or requests that might need to be addressed before next day, say what positive changes they made since morning meet, what could use some working on, what they’ll strive to conquer under Saturday’s sun. They also recap their earlier set goals and if you met at least one, get a sticker of your choosing (a cool guy smiley or a happy bear or a scratch and sniff banana) to go into your chart, which is highest tier. It says more than a plus or a check.

Sam was busy drawing treasure maps so he didn’t make or meet any goals today but Dean, who’s occupying the seat to the left, has an arm slung around the back of Sam’s chair like a 50’s drive-in so by his scale, yes, he did. Sam’s been feeling more or less backseat heavy for almost three hours.

They’re having visitors from the children’s ward tomorrow. A possible buddy project startup.

“But it’ll just be face painting and ice cream sandwiches for now.” Participation strongly encouraged.

No one’s paying attention, not to them, so Dean starts doing lewd morse against Sam’s bicep. 

Sam thinks it’s that, at least. There’s not actually any tapping, just sweeps and flows like sand writing and it tickles but not in a ticklish way. In a small blurted leak through the cotton way. Dean’s hand is warm but his fingers, they’re boiling. One catches the hem of Sam’s shirt sleeve, toys with it like it's—panties, like deciding, _do I wanna get my knuckles sticky?_ , and goes in.

It feels like he’s just stuck his whole hand up Sam’s skirt, Sam’s poodle skirt, and Sam’s a good girl but he’s not giggling, not saying oh no, Johnny, do you think I’m fast? Sam spreads his legs and Dean’s look down means that he’s noticed. Big. Damn, Sammy. He imagines that’s what Dean would say, said once when Sam was sixteen and a chronic, compulsive masturbator stealing socks and thinking furiously about Dean just holding his hand.

The tech wants to know if everyone’s understood tomorrow’s directive, wants an ensemble answer.

“Yes,” Sam says, tongue mostly stuck inside his mouth so it’s a young moan if anyone cared to hear.

He isn’t sure if Dean’s just written SUCK or SNAW and Sam doesn’t even know what snaw means. Dean’s got mannequin control, face to the front, by every account taking in what the tech’s saying about basic mind building, nodding where needed, not nodding off, alert, a discipline that dad drove home at 100mph. And his life-trusted trigger finger moves imperceptibly to pass a note nobody can see. 

You should be able to see Sam’s breath, though. The room should be smog, the residents should be complaining about the humidity in their hair, everyone empty out, just a safety drill, no running.

Wait, go back, Sam thinks, eyes wide. He was distracted. He couldn’t feel what Dean wrote after snaw. He was too busy trying to lock down his abdomen and school his forehead straight but there were definitely two Fs. It had to have been OFF. It might have been ME OFF. In which case it was probably not snaw. Is this a game or an instruction? Go back, please go back. Dean adds a period.

=

9:42 p.m.

Sam has to focalize on the three-part plan they’ve come up with.

1.

He has a little acrylic handbasket for his toiletries (no shavers) that he made sure was full enough but not too full. His washcloth, his glycerine bar soap, face wash, scrubby pad, deodorant, 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner. Sam adds in a thing of hand sanitizer and peppermint toothpaste for clutter. 

“Leave a pocket,” Dean said, so Sam hollows out a little cavity in his supplies.

“Hurry,” Sam said, instead of saying _I’d really rather not have you out of eyesight at all._

Dovine originally served as an orphanage when it was erected some time in the ship fever years, when tuberculosis was still thought of as a romantic disease. A lot of it was torn down and reconstructed over the decades but the showering area still stands as it was, humble and untouched. Sam steps naked under the lukewarm spray and nudges his handbasket out of the splash zone with a wet toe, a little further outside his stall than usual.

There’s not much of a scram and claim happening tonight and there usually isn’t at this hour.

It’s mostly the craggy gentlemen sort who prefer their hair tonics and their wooden shaving brushes that haven’t touched a chin in an age, and the kid getting special treatment by an orderly at the one bath tub in the open corner. Plus Dean who’s being wily where Sam can’t see, and Sam whose heart is like a wild hog in a trap while he loads soap suds up inside himself as shyly as he’s ever done. Bold hope keeps him working at it but this isn’t part of the plan so he hurries it along.

Lars takes his baths at night, too, and, since the psychiatric staff did away with all the curtains hung from the rods once the population shifted from kids to kooks, Sam’s not keen on giving keyhole peeps. 

Not to that guy. He reminds Sam of Vincent Schiavelli but bawdy.

The one who comes around and drops a slim squeezy tube into Sam’s little bin with a plunk that’ll be inaudible to anyone else over the rush of multiple showerheads going—is different. Might’ve, and this is just rumor, handed out a flat-top cut cleaner than a jarhead's by way of industrial electric saw a time or two but he was just plain born too pretty, god’s own fault. And that one’s a fact. That special type of behind-bars butcher women faint over and send perfumed letters to and wanna have babies by so bad.

“Getting long,” Dean says, like he’s just passing through, making an observation. Just jailhouse talk.

Sam’s hair is glossy with shampoo, hanging all punked at his cheeks and blearing some of his sight where he’s trying to work out a few rude knots before he rinses, so he can’t see very well where exactly Dean’s looking, if he’s looking, and it’s too hard to tell if Dean means Sam’s hair, or Sam’s something else. 

Thinking about snawing Dean deep to the back of the throat can raise a guy’s blood pressure and more, and it shows.

Step one is complete, though, and Sam disguises the prize with his peppermint paste, jumbles the rest of his basket contents so it looks careless and unconcerned.

=

10:15 p.m.

Last round of meds is done at one of the monitoring stations in single file fashion and someone somewhere a few people ahead is humming the dreamlike opening bars of Crazy. 

The night techs roll eyes and keep the line moving but some of them have begun harmonizing a little, too, because those raised right agree: Patsy’s a queen. Sam was a pup raised for dogfighting so he shuffles forward and just hopes to get through this without witnessing anyone’s molipaxin meltdown or some new-drug dystonia. 

“Cut?” Camilo says, and cuts. 

Sam wants to mind but really it gives him another thirty seconds to try to figure out if this is going to work or not, or if he’s instead just booby-trapped his own trap.

Camilo hasn’t the grace nor posture of a ballerino but he puts his arms in fifth position and though he isn’t singing, Sam _shh_ s him anyway—but cuts off when the atypical taste touches his tongue.

2.

It’s supposed to be flavor free, the glob he’s stuck to the roof of his mouth, but it has a non-taste taste, like grits.

Camilo chugs back his cup, sips his water, caves open his mouth. You’re good, go, next.

“What is it?” Sam says, even if tonight he doesn’t care. This is a scent he wants to keep them on so he sticks to habit and waits for them to say temazepam so he can nod consent then take the peach pill where he’ll have to quickly tongue-cup it, maneuver it, then lift it up flat until it—there. It stuck. It stuck. Sam hurries to swallow some saliva and show them his docility. Down the hatch.

“Next.”

He rushes back to his room to wait. Dean was right. The security cameras catch Sam smiling but it’s fine. He can always say he was heartened by his own progress. Step two done.

Next.

=

11:51 p.m.

It’s meant to act as a mirror, the popsicle sticks and pipe cleaner frame hung on the opposite wall, grown off of an idea that a Dutch man named Piet Mondrian had about pure mirrors having truer reflections. It was from Self Portrait Day here at the hospital a few months back and Sam considers it, in the stripe of moon glow coming in through the window. Lights out was almost an hour ago.

“Um, it’s ugly,” Sam said when Dean rescued it from the trash scraps where Sam had thrown it after having it viewed by a tech then charted, picked it clean of stray glitter and debris. “And I didn’t even try that hard.” He’d been preoccupied with a rerun of Unsolved Mysteries he could see in the small television set left on in the staff break room. “Dude, just—”

“No, I’m keeping it.” 

Dean flicked the ritzy purple feather Sam had stuck on absently while trying to crack a case that sounded a little like the vanishing of Adam Walsh, and fixed it to the wall even though the backing was made from a roll of chrome Christmas wrapping paper someone on the staff had leftovers of and brought in, little more than smoothed out aluminum foil so it barely even reflected.

Sam cracks his back and tries to resettle in the bed. He’s exhausted. And the mirror could probably still show it.

It’s quiet, at least, and frequently in the nighttime when Sam’s awake like this and the ward is asleep, only the occasional clonk clonk of slip-resistant clogs passing through the halls, he can imagine he’s somewhere meant for silhouettes and solitude and unhurried silences. Like in a church or a crematory, everyone welcome. 

That multivitamin gummy was probably expired. He’s being weird. Sam does the 4-7-8 breathing technique and keeps looking for soft-footed shadows under the door, waiting for step three to start.

Camilo’s nice and all but he’s a little too snoopy. Not about the clowns, that was fine. Sam OK’ed that. It’s more the “so what’s your brother’s story” questions that he kept trying to rephrase and trick out of him, what Dean was ‘in for’, “what, did he just, like—follow you here?” Yes, Sam said, to axe it.

He wishes he’d put underwear on now. It’s oversharing that he didn’t, and says too much that he’s confident, or worse, _expectant_ of someone pulling open his pants for a purpose. That they’d go hide in the closet and have silent sex crouched on the floor, uncomfortable and hectic, coming three times, in love. 

The door pushes apart an inch, then a foot, then enough for a solid body to slide through.

When Dean said _I can eat fifty eggs_ he was saying _wait for me_ out loud for only Sam to know.

3.

“What took you,” Sam whispers, irritable to cover his relief when Dean knees up onto the bed and squishes in beside him, putting a hand over Sam’s mouth like they do in the movies and looking around at the form in the other bed, at the rectangle window on the room’s door. Nobody wakes and no team of techs seem to be alerted to a patient at liberty. Dean takes away his hand but it feels like it’s still there. 

“Hi,” Sam says, to make sure he can.

“Just successfully pulled off a breaking and entering in a heavily watchdogged institution and you bitch that I didn’t clip a rose out of the garden after raiding the safe,” Dean says, hugging Sam around the waist as he says it so he’s not too bothered. Then, cautiously, “so it worked?”

Sam reaches for their box of trades that he keeps hidden in a hole under the mattress, full of extra nail clippers and half smoked menthol stubs, diuretic water caplets, some stamps, a mini toothbrush sharpened to a skewer, and tonight’s sleep aid. Denture adhesive works better than cheeking. 

“Sweet,” Dean says, eyeing the pill. “Maybe we can sell it for a condom.”

“What.” 

Sam turns, trying to read Dean’s face. Who would need a condom and for what? Sam knows for what but what _for_ and his small intestine knots while he thinks again _who_. Dean laughs him off, dips his middle finger into Sam’s bellybutton, the flat of Sam’s stomach shaking, but he’s distracted by Dean saying,

"Were you picking your hair out?”

“I missed you,” Sam sulks, mad that Dean can tell. Happy that Dean can tell.

Dean rubs the spot at Sam’s temple with his nose, says _don’t do that_ in a tone you’d use for hurt baby knees. After a while he asks, “What’s his deal?” when Sam is tired of people asking about other people instead of asking how many tongues Sam’s in the mood to have in his mouth right now. Two. To answer, two.

“Some kind of scratchy disease or something. He’s always bleeding. Like maybe scabies? But I don’t know if that’s what put him here. He’s okay, I guess—”

“Parasitosis.” They’re not loud about it but Dean’s so close.

“What do you—”

“Bugs,” Dean says, nodding sure. He grabs Sam’s chin and sends him looking over there, at the flung arms with the septic looking sores, the littler lesions. “Don’t those look like ant bites?” Kind of. If he’d fallen right on the pile and let the whole colony come up without moving. “He thinks he’s got bugs all up inside him.”

“Like a tapeworm?” Sam thought those made you shit, not scratch.

“Could be, but more likely actually the ants. Or fleas. Or, fuck, silverfish. Maybe there’s a whole little buggy fête happening in there.”

“Mean,” Sam says, without meaning it. "Fête’?”

“What? I thought all that froufrou yanked your crank, schoolboy. Don’t tell me I’m too distinguished for you now?” 

Sam wants to ask what’s happening here but it’s after midnight, a new day separate from the really bad day, and the hot air between them feels fragile. “Of course not,” he says, honest, and, “how do you know that crap anyway?”

“Seen it before.”

“When before,” Sam says. Frustrated, he’s beginning to wonder if that maddening little pinky finger skimming the elastic band of his scrub pants is planning on just turning his nuts blue all night. “I was there for all your befores.”

“Not all, Sammy.”

That stings him, quick. He doesn’t like to think about Dean and anyone. Dean and babysitters. Dean and biology partners. Dean and nurses. And Dean really never rubs that in his face because he has to know by now that jealousy lines Sam’s blood vessels.

“But hey, speak of the cupid,” Dean says, spooning Sam closer to his chest.

That’s not a phrase, Sam thinks, feeling small and petulant, but then remembers waking up to Dean’s afterimage only and the coldest, most alone hours he’d been through in so long and pushes stealthily back into Dean’s arms armored around him.

“Remember that one carnival we went to?”

It's halting, and probably meant to crush Sam’s breath and leave it there in his chest like it does. He could say which one, could say we’ve been to a few, could ask—do you mean when I was eight and we reached the top of the ferris wheel and I thought you looked like one of Pastor Jim’s angels?

“Yes.” He knows which one Dean’s mouthing about, near the slope of Sam’s neck and it’s none of those.

“What do you remember about it?” 

“Not much.” A lot. “A little?” Everything. “That girl blowing chunks by the hot dog stand.” He probably just made that up.

“Let’s say, halfway through the night. But a little closer to closing,” Dean says, egging. 

"The shootout game? You were really good at it. You knew you'd be. I think they had never seen anyone so good. They thought it’d be,” hard, right behind him, right at his butt, “really hard.” The pillow's still a little damp from Sam's hair and he breathes into it to muffle himself. “It's always so hard.” Sam rubs with his tailbone to check, to test what cannot possibly seriously be happening, just a sleepy shift subtle enough to be taken back easily if necessary. He doesn't need to. Dean’s rubbing back. With his— “But you just. Won.”

“I did, didn’t I?” Dean says, a little pink in the middle. Affected, too.

Sam’s talking but only so this doesn’t end, “and you picked Mr. Happy from the top row and gave him to me even though I was being mean about you dropping the caramel apple.”

Dean stops everywhere. His warming mouth and working hips. He stops and says, “Mr. Happy? You named him that?” Sam could fucking faint. There was motion. Serious motion. Now Dean’s hiding a laugh in Sam's shirt.

“No,” Sam says, crabby. “That’s what it said on his tag.”

“Okay, yeah. Mr. Happy,” Dean says. And, gross, “tell me about him.”

But Sam doesn’t want to anymore and isn’t really sure if they’re even talking about the clown now and this is weird and he kind of just wants to haul down the back of his pants to see what’d happen, if Dean would brake first, and Dean’s saying, “Sammy, c’mon,” a little pleaded, so Sam, pleased, says, “I carried him under my arm while we looked for something else to do.”

Sam can feel a doublewide smile at his throat and Sam’s two-fist dick clenches, hard so that it tugs the blanket that’s over them—out, visibly. Dean says, “and what did we find to do?”

“That funhouse.”

“It was fun?”

So fun. And so scary. Sam has to wet his lips so they’re not just stuck all dry and desperate. “More than. I thought I was being stupid and I thought you—” he doesn’t know. With a firm prompting behind him, “I thought you were just fucking with me.”

Dean sounds like a meat grinder. “What else?”

“That song was playing,” and he knows Dean’ll say which, Dean’s asking for a lot, “Aerosmith.” Yeah, Dean remembers too. This is the second time in as many hours Sam’s heard someone humming something called Crazy but this time it’s his brother and this time it’s up against Sam’s very thin skin. “It was loud in the speakers, through all the rooms. We almost got lost.”

“Wanted to.”

“You did?” Sam never knew that. He'd felt like a yo-yo thrown too far, miserable for wanting. What he wanted and who he wanted it with.

“Always seemed you had something on your mind other than me,” Dean says, ad-libbing, and Sam feels fairly hysterical so he closes his eyes, letting himself slip on an old stone, thinking. It might have even been on a loop. It snags him. Has him saying, “Actually why _was_ that song playing. That had nothing to do with wacky mirrors or roller rooms or—”

“Sam, focus.” 

Sam laughs.

“Man, you go. Your turn.” Sam’s only barely speaking, they both are, so that no one’s pulled awake but Dean hears.

“We went down that glowy footprint path and I kept bumping into the wall and letting you think it wasn’t on purpose so that you'd—”

“I grabbed your hand,” Sam can’t help himself from saying, and can’t help reaching down to grab Dean’s hand here, too. 

“And there was me overthinking it, in that thousand door square we couldn’t get out of for a while.” Dean says, “told myself I was seeing shit. That you weren’t—”

“But I was,” Sam says. 

His back’s sweaty, he’s holding Dean’s wrist down on him with a palm, very low. It's already well over anything he thought he might get, thought they’d lay trained and vigilant in the dark to count the minutes until someone came, if they came, or the two of them would take turns keeping watch, talking a little, developing plan B, or C—if it came down to it and they’d make it out for real this time, get the first orderly they saw in a sleeper, swipe a keyring and walk right out, floor it on the other side. Sam’s almost beside himself with arousal and ache.

“Sam, I.”

“Keep going.” Sam’s kinda close just from nothing. The blanket feels good enough to soil.

Dean drags down the ball of his thumb, not into Sam’s pants but over them, where everything is obvious no matter what angle you’re coming from and a sound shocks out of Sam. His eyelids dip and his hips jump hard, once, and he has to calm down. Dean notches a couple fingers into the line coming up Sam’s abdomen instead of going for the mercy kill, says,

“It fucked me up pretty bad. Knowing that—. I mean, I looked at you and thought I’d never,” tight swallow, “want someone more than that, than I did right then.” Sam feels impossible inside.

Dean says, “and I guess you know I still haven’t.”

Sam doesn’t know if he says "Dean" out loud but he says it somewhere, and Dean tells him, “after that, it was that laser room.”

“Yeah.” Sam’s past being embarrassed by the wetness of his words. How strong they come out, and how weak.

Dean sighs into Sam’s hair, at the hairline where it feels like firecold shock, and he admits, “it was luck, you know. It had to be. That no one else was in there. That those kids in front of us the whole time finally fucking beat it and. Sammy you were—” His hand’s skinned its way up to Sam’s chest, where it’s stayed open-palmed to the center, where every kick is slamming mad, “you looked so good.”

Helpless, Sam’s lips unlock. He hears himself blurt, “I’d daydream in the car about tasting you.”

Dean chokes, bites Sam under the jaw hinge, by his ear. 

“Maybe I’d been thinking stuff, too. Maybe—the most pervert shit, but I’d never. I couldn’t even believe that you might want—” It’s blind movement, Sam bullying Dean’s hand warmly into his pants, straight in, where he’s swollen with oversensitivity, where it hurts less when Dean’s there. _“Sam.”_

Dean doesn’t do much but hold him hot in one hand for a time but it feels like one of them may just lose it anyway, Dean doing nothing and still making Sam stream all over his knuckles. It notches every next motion louder, when Dean does start jerking at him, a little, nastily obvious how Sam feels, and anyone would know how good for it Sam is, how much he likes having his skinny neck sucked, how badly he wants this to be happening.

“You pretended the red lasers were high power, like they were real," Dean says, "then you, then you pressed your hand to your mouth and said it got you. I knew what you were doing, or what I wanted to believe you were doing,” Sam’s body feels slurred. Just letting things around him happen, waiting for whatever Dean will give, counting out his swallows, “and I said it anyway.”

“‘Want me to kiss it better?’” 

“Yeah,” Dean runs a thumb through a slick new spill, makes Sam’s thighs slap clean together, and then stops so he can wedge him back open and tuck his longest finger further back, no, no, no, “and you let me.”

It’s so good Sam feels sick from it.

Dean says, “and when we stopped, you had this look. Of loving me but not ‘cause you had to.”

He might fall from the bed if Dean stops helping weigh him down and Sam’s hand shoots out, to the little table to the side, just something sturdy to push back on, Dean rubbing soft at him, a little dipping, _Dean, don’t, don't, you’ll make me_ —and somewhere in his head he knows he’s coming all over the place in his pants but he can’t process it, not even as it’s going and going and Dean's grabbing his face and turning it so that Sam feels like a little toy, a dangerous, delicate feeling and they’re kissing, and they keep kissing, and Sam’s still bleeding out white like it might never find an end.

Dean’s eyes are beautiful when they open, brand-new green. Shined and wide.

Step three got away from them there, a little. They have to wonder for a moment if Camilo’s dead.

After very long of Sam breathing up at the ceiling in puffs, a strand of hair fallen into his mouth and unmoved, Dean says, “are you okay?” like Sam just had a medical emergency. 

“Yes,” Sam says, once he’s given himself enough time to think about it, to make sure that it’s true. Sam’s sated, and so smitten, and Dean is fooling with the finger-webbing on Sam’s hand even though Sam smells like a blown load. The corridor is still hushed and dim. Dull continuous gusting from the vents, a distant beeping. Hospital sounds. 

He finally has to tell Dean, though, the day having fatigued him down to it, “I might fall asleep. Dean, hey. What if I fall asleep?”

“Regular sleep is okay,” Dean reminds him. He helps turn Sam’s pillow to the fresh side. _As long as it’s not prescription ‘presleep’_. “I’ll wake you if anything happens.” If the more brusque overnight orderlies come to loot their room again. Wrestle Dean out. “I’m not tired. Slept all damn day.” 

Step three only requires that Sam be wake-able. He curls to the curve of Dean’s body, Dean going back to hmming Crazy, finger combing the kinks out of Sam’s hair.

Dawn comes like a black eye.

The weather outside sounds like sobbing and it is, splashes at the the room’s barred over window and it’s grey at five past five when Sam wakes, woken to Dean saying sweet shit in his ear, low and unbelievable, and that he’s gotta leave before folks start coming around, before someone notices. The rain sobs a little harder.

They don’t say goodbye because they’ll be back together in two hours, and because it’d feel—ridiculous. Like a morning after. Brothers don’t have booty calls. Sam slugs back onto his bed after Dean goes and lays there for a while thinking a lot about tilt-a-whirl lovers.

About how certain boys can ruin you for any others.

He gets up and cleans his dick eventually, even if a secret sicko part of him doesn’t want to.

“Bird bath,” Sam says to himself in front of the sink like Dean would next to the motor inn commodes, and runs the damp washcloth under his pits and over his thighs, lifts the bulk of his junk to scour off the worst of it.

The mood throughout the center is elevated despite the thundery morning that everyone gathers at the day room’s big window to look out at for a while, pointing out frog-heads in the grass. 

They’re having guests over soon and it’s a charming enough change from the monotony that even if the staff are the ones bustling around to get things set up and looking a little more colorfully welcoming, a bunch of the residents want to pitch in with small things, too. Hanging mismatched birthday streamers and honeycomb balls, hiding illegitimate ashtrays they’ve repurposed out of other objects in the burn-holed couch cushions. 

So it isn’t too revealing, Sam’s pleasant state. Everyone else seems a little merrier, too.

Mrs. Mabel wears foam curlers to bed every evening and won’t leave the room without her signature cranberry lipstick smoothed on. She gives Sam a quick eyeballed pick-apart that's piercing, that tells him yes, young man, she knows. Women who might’ve just been silver screen sirens back in their day are well familiar with after-sex glow and just what it looks like. 

Sam flattens his lips and flushes and keeps walking when she winks. 4-7-8.

=

There’s really something to be said about lovesickness and how when you have it, everyone around you can see it as though you’re a walking symptom.

Even when you’re sure you’ve done a pretty damn esteemed job at camouflaging, it’ll turn out that really you’re just standing there doing the equivalent of waving your genitals around and intolerably grinning. 

Of all the combat competence and instinctual know-how dad pounded into them, he left out the entire subcategory on what to do and how to act when your knees keep knocking and you just wanna blurt out the kind of asshole shit that you so shouldn’t say to anyone ever. It would’ve been a useful one to have holstered to the thigh. Sam’s had more than ten years experience dealing with this peeled open, undercooked feeling and he still can’t find immunity.

“Probably don’t want me to sit with you this time,” Camilo says beside him.

Sam looks at him. Sam doesn’t say, I didn’t really want you to sit with me any other time either.

“I don’t care. What do I care? I’m just asking.”

This is why Sam doesn’t really enjoy the concept of friends. It’s a needy exchange. Someone will regularly want something from you even if it’s just your attention or opinion, and it isn’t good enough for you to just know them a few hours a month from a manageable distance, you have to either be constant or cogent and sometimes you selfishly want to be neither. Sam says, “what makes you say that?” to avoid answering.

“I thought. Isn’t he back? Your brother? He’s back, right?”

“He is. But—” What interesting colors Sam must be right now, all turniped and spreading, mortified over—how loud were they?—what must have been overheard in the night. What must be obvious now in all this fluorescence. What’s not legal in any state. 

Passing the handjob water fountain, Camilo says, “yeah, you don’t even look like the same guy from yesterday. Figured he was.”

“I don’t feel like that guy either,” Sam says, real and relieved.

“Don’t suppose I could meet this Dean dude over juice and biscuits?”

“Not, um. Not yet.” He’d feel bad if he could but he isn’t enthusiastic about sharing Dean even on insignificant days. 

“Later then,” Camilo says, wandering into the livening cafeteria and away, Sam left debating whether he meant he’d be expecting a hearty introduction in the soon future or if he meant goodbye. But hell. Sam must be masking it terribly because it seems he’s just about covered in hives today, even though it’s actually just one wild red hickey that he keeps trying to hide with his hair. 

=

Truthfully, it takes Dean’s head snapping up for Sam to realize he’s just been slogging through his oatmeal in a kind of slow-drip stupor, disinterestedly spooning, chin sitting in his other hand.

“What?” 

Dean’s never been one for attention, especially such fixed attention. Makes him all grousey.

There’s a difference between chicks tittering when they first see him, averting their eyes and telling friends _look, oh god_ versus being straightforwardly stared at from a foot’s reach in such an anecdotal way, someone noting tooth points and tendon shifts and the amount of something a mouth can comfortably hold. 

Slurping sugar-o’s is unexpectedly erotic. 

“Sam. Stop.”

Sam finishes counting the clump of spots just above one arching eyebrow despite having known since jungle gym maturity that there are twelve there exactly. Dean has a cloudy milk smudge on his top lip and he’s waiting for the answer to a question he didn’t ask so Sam may as well give it to him.

“I want to kiss you so bad right now,” Sam says hotly.

It’s only a partial. In actuality, it’s taking a prudence Sam can barely hang onto to not confess that he’s been sitting here stirring his instant oats remembering how last night Dean played with his _cock_.

Dean, proving again how he’s the most enduring person Sam knows, doesn’t hiss that people might hear or goggle at him or tilt his head like he’s thinking there ought to be a way to put bold black censored signs on real people in real life, a pixelization across the face as someone says something degrading. Dean also doesn’t pretend to not hear.

It could’ve been easiest, but he doesn’t. 

Behind Dean, there’s a girl with bedridden blonde hair who’s scraping all of the cinnamon out of her cinnamon roll and pausing to paint her nails a vehement, tomato red. It’s allowed but outdoors only, not in here. The fumes are full-bodied by the time she gets to her marriage finger and Dean says, “you can,” and leaves breakfast ten minutes earlier than everyone else.

=

Out in the world, these sorts of places—maybe on a low hill overlooking a lilypad pond or the unmarked gravel roads that’ll lead somewhere cool if you take them far enough, that one spot off State Highway 60, or somewhere like Pike Grove that not too many people who live life outside of cars know about—are often called lookout points. The scenery is the whole purpose, even if it is just a footnote to the real story which is about intent.

It’s actually called the same thing in here, too, and mostly for the same reasons.

Sam’s mopping like he volunteered to do but he’s lost the rhythm to it, looking over at the small nook here in this common room divided from the rest by a couple of large pillars and some tall, fake ficus trees in terracotta pots. It was probably carved out optimistically, for reading. For residents to lounge up with a book and look out at the manicured backyard grounds from the big stretch of windows, day-drunk on antidepressants, leafing through Valley of the Dolls.

It’s visited mostly by the darlings, though. The pairs that slink off with everyone knowing why.

“Where?” Dean said, letting Sam tug him by his arm joints.

“Here, I. Here’s fine.” 

“No, you said something about wanting to—” He touched the corner of Sam’s new smile, growing large, “so I meant. Where do you wanna kiss me?”

How he held Sam’s eyes with no flinches, even a little leaning in, it made Sam feel sure. When people sing florally about summer-month crushes, it can share such similar notes as when they’re disclosing the details of a lifelong addiction. Excessive doting reads the same as obsessive begging and if Dean wanted, Sam would’ve. Whatever it was.

The instinctual way an animal will, Sam went right for the throat, Dean holding him in place with two hands on the back of his head, sighing. Sighing Sam.

“Sam,” Jilly says.

She’s clearing the end table of travel brochures and National Geographics and a questionably rippled lingerie catalog from Spring 2002, fanning out a few picture search books and some Shel Silverstein.

“No one’s making you do that. Sit down. Go get some air.”

There are little black flakes near her tear ducts that look like yesterday’s leftovers, that cause her to look sad. She’d make a good muse for someone writing a screenplay about widows and mistresses.

He’s been doing watery figure eights on the same two or three tiles. 

Sam smiles in apology and dips in for more suds to work his way through the rest of the room, only looking a few more times to the little nook where Dean opened his mouth for Sam’s scared tongue, let Sam hump helplessly at his leg, and where he put a kiss to each of Sam’s dimples twice, even the little less noticeable one on Sam’s chin in the small five minutes they had. Dean, dusting fixtures and wall art nearby, has lips stronger than a teaspoon of heroin.

=

The badges are what stick out the most to Sam. They've got bubble letters, a happy font. Something that lives in a pediatrician’s office where the patients still get to go home after a visit.

They’re color coded minimalistically, with a wide stripe of red or yellow or lavender backing the photo squares to probably give the kids a better at-a-glance understanding of who each person is specifically. An attendant, their doctor, just a friendly nurse. Nurses seem very lavender. 

Puffy alphabet stickers in pastels and metallics spell out so and so’s name, even though it’s typed professionally and much smaller elsewhere on the badge. ANNISE in gold glitter, ERIN split between two different pinks, RONNIE in rainbow. Three escorts from the children’s ward with a group of about a dozen 6—14 year olds. They do seem a little more joyed than the techs who deal with the adults. It’s kind of nice.

“Don’t wanna mold a mind?” Dean asks, nudging at Sam where he’s thrown himself in an armchair, antisocially sitting, watching the commotion and noise from spectator safety.

Candidly, he’d rather go back to his room and try to coax his brother into birds-and-beeing him but all rooms are on a restriction right now to promote healthy fraternization and dissuade any black clouds of misanthropy, which don’t necessarily have to be opposites, Sam thinks. Dean’s brought him a cup from the punch bowl that’s filled with an over-iced V8 juice blend. Sam sips, and thinks.

“No.” 

They’re doing some kind of craft that requires graham crackers, threesomes and foursomes of kids with typically disruptive disorders and folks from Sam and Dean’s unit who’ll often bite to communicate distress, mingled but tightly mediated, and Sam can’t really work out how it’s meant to be leisure education. He misses chasing chupacabras and dabbling in spellwork. It was all much simpler.

“Come on, you love projects,” Dean says. 

Sam’s waiting for someone to throw themselves against a wall.

“Aren’t you Mr. Gold Ribbon Science Fair of ‘94?” He’s balanced on the arm of Sam’s seat and he’s wheedling. It’s obvious and a little thick and Sam still isn’t entirely resistant to it. “I’ll go if you go?”

“To construct a cake house?” They’ve set out organic fruit snacks in place of gumdrops. “Sure, um—let me just go get my t-square.” He feels a little mean but Dean laughs.

“Then how about, hey. How about we hit up that daisy chain table over there?”

“Flower crowns,” Sam says, “there’s an un-porny way to say that. And I’m fine right here, man. Just. I don’t want to.” Through a mumble, “why don’t _you_ go mold a mind if you’re so eager.” 

“Already did that, sweetheart,” Dean gets close to his ear to tell him, as though it’s as coarse as saying the word cunt out loud. “I ever tell you you’re pretty as fuck when you’re being all piss pants?”

Sam goes a little sideways without moving, tries to say shut up, but it’s made of tremble and teeth.

“Serious. You get real superior and cankerous and your mouth does this little pinchy thing, there you go, yes, exactly like that. Makes me think, yeah, Dean, you should definitely hit that.”

Sam’s body hairs could be brush bristles. Nobody’s had to blow a whistle yet but, you know, maybe they should. He can’t tell what Dean’s trying to do, besides randy him up right here where the whole hospital’s convened, but it seems risky, having level 6 emotions where anyone might see like meat in a deli.

Someone’ll look this way and there will be Dean all TV-smile and destructive loveliness, and next to him there will be Sam, exposed as glass: quality red liver, lean pancreas up on a block, fine looking kidneys, and the tenderest cut—the place where he has adored Dean with every pump of it. Which selection should we wrap up for you? Sam imagines someone taking a chop of his appendix home in wax paper.

“You should.”

Dean drains the last of Sam’s juice out and swallows. “I will.”

=

This particular exertion isn’t so bad, Sam thinks, and it’s maybe because he’s not the one exerting himself. 

Little stations are set up all throughout the common, small fold-up tables spread over with stencils and paint sets and two chairs per table, one for the painter, one for the subject. Some of these kids are just about the age of objection on principle, too embarrassed and too cool, but even the most churlish children come lurking around, really just waiting in line for their turn at the Living Sketch exhibit.

The hospital calls it that, not Sam.

“What are you drawing on me?” Sam asks, even though Dean said it was a secret for now.

“Something adorable,” Dean says, concentrating more adorably probably, holding Sam by the cut of his jaw.

The youngsters are getting octopuses and bunny faces and princess butterfly tiaras on their foreheads, while the tweens in the mix are opting for tattoo style etchings around their wiry, punch-nothing arms, tribal swirls, mom style hearts that say something other than mom, a snake, a spool of spiderwebs. Dean’s using a lot of red, Sam finally notices.

“Dude, this better not be some sigil or something.” 

“Quiet,” Dean says, “I’m doing this for you. Just—shh. Just sit there.”

With everyone getting to trade around to have the opportunity to create, Camilo’s a couple of tables over getting turned into something with lopsided fangs or tusks by a tiny, frizzy haired girl about the size of Sam’s big toe, and he gets scolded by her for nodding over to approve of whatever Sam’s got going on so Sam guesses it must not be so satanic looking, or frilled.

“You got a good face for this,” Dean says, kind of too serious for Sam to know what to do with.

“Yeah?”

“Hot,” Dean says, and now Sam just thinks he’s being goosed.

He hadn’t really expected it, when Dean got upset with him, when he’d said _what? What do you mean? Sam, you can’t just_ —when Sam was complaining about feeling a little queasy through the stomach, a generic kind of hollow, I’m fine, it’s fine, think it was just that next skipped dose. He’d wanted to try out that denture glue cheat again to make sure it wasn’t a fluke and it wasn’t, worked a second time for morning meds; he wasn’t figuring Dean to look at him sharply and check up on his pupils, slash off a lecture about weaning the right way and getting cramps and Sam, check in with me first, okay? Okay? If we stop having each other’s backs, we’re as good as fucking dead in here and—Sam felt scolded and annoyed but also a lot alarmed. After that, letting Dean pushwalk him to the face painting tables was no trouble.

Dean does a couple of pointy somethings up on Sam’s head, in black, and puts his tools down.

In the mirror, Sam laughs. Not because it’s funny but because he’s smiling and a sound simply comes out with it. He likes how he looks and he really likes that Dean likes how he looks and Dean didn’t do anything more embellished than a semi-sheer wash of white, round rosy cheeks just like Sam’s, and a strawberry mouth that’s only a little overdrawn with a nose to match—

“Very nice,” says the lady who’s come up behind him in the wall mirror. Grey-yellow auntie hair pulled into a functional fishtail braid, warm eyed. 

“That you in there, Samuel?” 

Sam smiles at—Annise, a little unsure, a little like a radio caught between stations. 

“Has the Marvelous Mercurial one switched over to a funny-clown act?” 

He isn’t wearing a nametag like hers, bubble letters or not. 

“Sam? Hi?” she says, now unsure, too, and Sam should probably have a drink of water if he can’t place why she’s talking to him the way she is. 

It’s starting to bother him too quickly to consider why and he’s tugging on a few strands of temple hair when Dean comes in saying something lameass about his brother having flare ups over his dairy intake all day that Sam wants to sneer at but is secretly thankful for, and pulls Sam away from the complexity of the moment. 

=

When they were little boys, Sam had the kind of skin that would bronze and Dean had the kind that’d blister. It’s still overall so but since they’ve been at Dovine they’ve mostly evened out and met somewhere in the middle, no sunbathe and no sunburn. Dad wasn’t the beach trip type by a lot but they certainly weathered a lot more weather then than they do in the psych house today. 

Some differences have stuck around, though, like how Sam’s forearms hold tight to a tan and his hair lays dark and even, and how Dean’s midriff can’t ever stop being pale, the way he’s gold and ginger in all the places Sam gave his preteen mind over to wondering if it would be so.

The fact of Dean’s ultra fair complexion just means that it’s an even fuller narrative to the events taking place here between the tubs and the towel rags, in the outdated scullery where no one ever looks, how the under-bit of his belly just beneath his navel is dabbled over ruby red from where Sam’s nose has been pressed to it, and pressed to it, and held, and mashed, and—oh damn, Sammy, don’t move.

Sam doesn’t. Sam stays where he’s comfortably kneeled, balancing his grip against Dean’s bare hips, eyes closed, mouth not, Dean’s cock sitting all the way inside of it.

“You can say stop, you—I’m sorry, you can say stop,” Dean says, but he’s still holding Sam tight to his groin and fucking in.

Sam makes a blackened noise. It’s meant to say _I’m fine_ and _keep going_ and _you were my first love_. It means I would never tell you to stop, not you. Dean must be able to translate some of that. His continued thrusts answer back generously.

Sam enjoys it, not just the taste, but that, too, but also the sacrificial feeling of it. 

That of the given public, he’s been selected for it. In all likelihood not because he’s the most sensible option—he’s not, even, he’s actually the least; seeking a sibling out for sex would call for a lot of chart marks—but maybe it’s that Dean thinks him most capable, someone who won’t be shied away from the task. Sam strengthens his throat to give five hard, grateful clenches and then goes to drag in a breath.

Dean’s holding on to a shelf now, when Sam blinks up. He’s got a bridge of blush across his nose.

When they’d fumbled in, even Sam hadn’t known what Sam wanted, what Dean might want, what Dean would allow for, or why they were here in the first place. If Dean was agitated with him for his behavior, having to cover for him with excuses thin as low ply gauze, for Sam going off plan with that pill, forgetting the bigger picture which for them has always been escape. A couple of good backslides and no telling what could happen. 

It can get confusing in here, start to feel like a scam.

Sam never really saw Dean working their mouths together and, carefully and questioningly, guiding Sam’s hand high to the wishbone part of his legs as something that was coming. It hung heavy there in the cotton, eager warm, and Sam couldn’t stop at just touching. 

“Wait, I. I didn’t get to shower off last night.” 

“That’s okay,” Sam said, so that he wouldn’t hear himself saying _thank god_ instead.

There’s a death toll that comes with people like this, and it’s just a tally of the ones who have loved them.

It isn’t enough to have the sort of looks that someone’ll notice from the other side of the sidewalk and walk unseeing through four lanes of steady traffic to get to, pretty people are in abundance. It’s the rest of what they’re made of, if they’re made of it, that’ll feel like slamming into a semi, Sam thinks, toying his tongue around the end that’s trickling saltwater. 

Dean’s tummy shakes and a few sweet fingers fly to Sam’s sideburn.

“I didn’t think you’d really—”

His shirt’s gotten all pulled up under his chin and he’s kept it there to see the show, to watch how much Sam wants him, and he looks so—in Timmy T.’s old room he had a small figurine kept by the bed that he’d frequently touch or gather up in his hands, a holdable statue of St. Anthony no more than seven inches tall, clasping a heart to his breast, ‘the finder of love,’ he was called. 

There’s no need to be remembering that now, while Sam’s breath smells like frothy road head. But there was a grace to the thing that called for touch, that made you want to.

Sam puts Dean back in his mouth but doesn’t close up his eyes, pattering lightly against the bottom, then pulling deep. He isn’t sure how good he is at this but Dean seems to like it okay, doesn’t seem to be suffering through this, so he keeps at it until it’s just Dean riding his face and making sounds unhelped, lost to it, to Sam’s mouth, hunching over, pants slipping further down his thighs where they’d been bunched down in a hurry, a stack of mothy linens toppling to the floor.

Even from this angle, he’s an arrogant sort of handsome. He doesn’t mean to be and he can’t be faulted for it, the fat fullness of his lip that drops down to curse, the richboy architecture of his cheek and chin bones when his head tips back as he’s—Sam swallows furiously, trying to keep up.

Especially from this angle, maybe.

=

“Better today,” Jilly says at pre-lunch vitals.

“Yes,” Sam says, only paying a little attention to his temperature read-out. 

There are pamphlets with stock images of quintet families and their waggy dogs, older couples clasped together, some solo faces grinning heavenward, on the low desk—self-help newsletters, a batch of bulletins for anyone to take, rehabilitation meetings for when you get out mostly cured that gather two nights a week at 7 p.m. in the library off Crand Ave., in the basement at the Y on Saturday mornings.

Dean’s in the doorway, next in line after Sam, and he’s leaning against it like it might be a brick wall and he’s got something cherry-lit dangled out his kisser, a fucked your mom look that never leaves the eye. 

His scrub shirt doesn’t look like everyone else’s scrub shirts; Dean’s looks, if you see it in just the right bend of light, like dark genuine leather, sleeved to the wrist, collar hiding his battered, bitten up neck. 

It isn’t, it’s just plain and colorless like all the others even if Dean himself isn’t, and Sam smiles recklessly at him.

Cut it out, Dean mouths at him, even though something looks like it wants to slit the seams at the corners of his lips, too. Sam doesn’t want to put a name to it yet in case he’s wrong, in case it goes away, in case a tug is just a tug and it’s a drought in here, slim pickings blowjobs, you know how it is, Sam—but it didn’t feel like that half an hour ago and it didn’t feel like that last night either, when Dean was ripping orgasms out of him and only barely touching Sam’s asshole.

Thirteen and seventeen is what it feels like, fried food sweets and sticky sno cones again, the flying teacup ride, numb from sucking face, every minute after a will-he won’t-he moment, so wanting. Lucky.

Dean looks—lucky. But Sam disappears his dimples because Dean’s right. 

Smiles are too legible. You can always tell when someone’s is out of civility or when they mean it, or when they mean it too much, or when it isn’t a smile at all and just mimics one, or when yours is that dusky drunklove kind that’s landing bullseye at one you should only know in an over the clothes nature.

Jilly hesitates. “Sam, if. If you need—” but she fades off whatever she might've said and reaches over and pulls out a supplies drawer. 

He knows—he’s seen women in extreme porn videos, how they’ll have a train run on them and then get wadded in the face in multiples, makeup running in five directions but worst by her mouth, just—wonderfully disgraced, but mild embarrassment is the best he can muster as he dabs at the remnants of his paint with the baby scented wet wipe Jilly’s given him.

“Thanks,” he says and leaves, munching his bittersweet gummy bear. “Be glad it’s not a full physical,” he says to Dean as he passes, soft and stolen. 

Dean’s eyes spring open where they’d been at a smug half mast, and he pinkens. Yeah. Yeah, Sam thinks. She’d find what happened to the rest of Sam’s hypoallergenic kid paint as soon as Dean dropped his pants to cough. You fucking slut, he thinks at Dean, thinks at himself, lucky.

=

Oh great, Sam’s thinking now, stepping into the room with a whimsical beat and the lights dimmed.

Some days there’ll be something almost cool coming from the stereo, bluesy or contemporary classical stuff that’s only a little boring after the thirtieth straight minute of it, or the kind of interstate rambling jams that the two of them know backhandedly—Fogerty’s Centerfield was a pretty alright day—but they’ve been burned more than once into thinking—hey this isn’t too terrible, before it is. 

Music therapy is hit or miss.

“What jive have we got today?” Dean says, sliding in behind him. They take side by side seats.

Sam’s just pleased that there are seats. Dance days exist, even if they have a partial opt out. 

They don’t want to strain anyone, that isn’t the point, but energy is usually what the center’s looking for during this rotation so Sam’s had to do a few push-up routines to acid jazz so he didn’t get bored while the others twirled halfheartedly, while Dean cleaned under his fingernails with a found paperclip and joined him for a round of forearm to tricep extensions. It’s about release. Music being ‘mind medicine’. 

They never play anything you can fuck to, anyway.

Once everyone’s found a chair, it’s “How about some journaling? How do we feel about that?”

Clipboards and clicky pencils are distributed so it isn’t a real question, and it isn’t a real journal either if this is technical, which it isn’t. It’s just scrap paper flipped over to the blank sides for them to scribble on—to reflect, that’s what this afternoon is about. Letter writing is remedial.

It can be to somebody who’s hurt you or someone you’ve hurt or you miss or one with whom you had a tumultuous love affair. It’s okay if you don’t know them or they’ve been dead eighty-six years or you saw them in a short film once and only remember the character’s name. Someone can just be yourself. They don’t care who you write to.

They keep the music on to quell nervousness and elicit contemplation, and they set a stopwatch to forty-five and let them go at it longhand. 

Sam shifts around to get settled, uncomfortable from that poor man’s enchilada he wasn’t even hungry for— _my stomach’s full enough_ turned out to be a tripwire, Sam laughing when Dean almost stumbled in the lunch line because of it, but eventually he sets himself to it and stays busy sanding down his lead despite Dean’s psst-ing and trying to get a peek, asking if it’s a poem, if it’s a raunchy one like in Playboy, if it’s for him.

“No,” Sam says, when the room’s one big beep and they’re done, not expecting Dean’s face to fall so far, “it isn’t.” He hadn’t known where he was going with it at first, but by the middle he couldn’t stop. 

The letters are confidential so no one’s required to turn anything in. They can be shredded or thrown or kept or if it’s a proper for real mailing type, collect a stamp and envelope at the front upon inspection. “But you can read it?” Sam feels dorky about it, a bit, but, “if you want.”

Dean takes it and tucks it down in his sock like a boot blade.

Sam doesn’t know why he wrote it. Sam especially doesn’t know why he wrote it to his father.

=

What are we? has crowded into Sam’s mind a couple of times, just—a couple of times. Crawled up his hoarse throat.

It can’t come out though because he won’t let it. You don’t ask that. There’s already an answer. They’re brothers. That’s first and that’s last, and if there’s more then there’s more but the more is sandwiched in there and you don’t have the commit or quit talk with the guy who showed you how to take a piss standing up without sacrificing the seat.

“Did you throw away those blueprints you made?” Dean asked and Sam hadn’t, no, handed over the hasty little map he’d drawn up, creased. “Should probably start thinking about—you know.” 

“No, yeah, it’s a good idea,” Sam said, and watched as Dean left to go scope out potential routes for departure. 

Dean didn’t comment about the small stars drawn in certain locations and there was no key box for a clue in, but he must’ve been able to guess, in some roundabout way. They may as well have been small hearts: here is where I thought about how your hand looked on my bare knee, here is where you seemed like you were going to say something you shouldn’t have, here is where I wished you had.

Sam’s GPA got him a yes from a stuffy school of kinda serious prestige. 

He knows—he suspects, strongly, that something’s happening to him. 

The things that have been sliding out onto the table, slowly, the same things he thought that if he kept in the peripheral and tried not to see then maybe he wouldn’t but. He’s forgetting things, really too many things. He knows he is. He keeps finding gaps in his life like a hedge maze with false exits. He should be able to remember the first time he came crying on his brother’s fingers without his brother reminding him.

It wasn’t last night. 

It wasn’t in this bed at all that Sam’s sitting at the edge of, bouncing a leg in thought. It was near Lewistown, Montana and he’d been doing a ninth grade book report on The Grapes of—Dean what the hell are you trying to, that tickles, the deadbolt’s not done, oh—a squeaked out _oh fuck_ , having to rewrite the torn wet pages in the morning, unable to look anyone in the eye that whole next day. 

They need to get out.

“Is that really how you feel?” Dean says, back sooner than Sam was expecting.

Sam’s chewing a long kink of hair, thinking paradoxically around his thoughts, and thinking of Dean’s pale eyes.

“You’re—” when his mouth quivers, he’s much more than gorgeous. “You’re sorry for it?” He’s holding the letter instead of the map.

“I didn’t—”

“You kinda did,” Dean says, smiling a not-smile. He gets these curt dents around his mouth when it happens.

“Look, I get it,” Dean says, but he doesn’t, “I wanna get it. But I just don’t think I’ve—I mean, Sam I have never fucking thought about us—about, about you, as,” he says, then goes back to us. “I didn’t think we were regrettable.”

“We’re not. I don’t think that.” The letter felt like a good thing, a glad thing. A do right by someone thing. “Did you read it upside down? I think you missed the—”

“The part where you apologize to John?” Oh. John. Dean must be feeling really antagonistic. 

“Right, yes, but it’s not.” Sam rakes his hair away, trying to find the right chain of words that’ll—he doesn’t know, at least get that cauterized look off Dean’s face. “Can you just come sit with me?”

“Don’t think I want to,” Dean says, after a silence that’s meant to feel like one.

“What?”

“Sorry, one of us might not be able to control ourselves,” Dean says, biting. “Could get disgusting.”

“I said me. I said I am.” The door has to remain open during daytime hours and Sam has to maintain his composure while Dean is mangling lines from Sam’s letter. “Not what we’ve been doi—” Dean’s standing with his arms up against his chest in an X, backed up against the closet wall, defensive, and it makes Sam ask, “You’ve been spoon feeding me, right?”

“What,” Dean says, loosening. He looks confused before he doesn’t. “What are you—”

“You have. You’re keeping something from me because you think you can bulletproof me that way.” It’s true as soon as Sam says it and he knows he’s right. “That’s what you do.” 

Dean’s fingers rumple the paper. He says, brittle, “Sam.”

“Yeah. I thought so.”

“Only. It was only until I knew you were getting better. Don’t act like I like lying to you.”

“Am I?” Sam asks.

“Almost,” Dean says, sure of it. He finally sits. He’s close enough for Sam to touch or for Sam to leave alone. “Think this place is just starting to sink its teeth in, is all.” But Sam doesn’t think that’s entirely true. It seems like it might just be all on him and it’s easy to press his overheated forehead into Dean’s working throat for safety. “And hey, all that—stuff, you know we don’t have to do any of that, right? If I made you—”

“I wanted to,” Sam says, shaking his head so his hair fluffs by Dean’s ear. “I want to.”

“You—”

“I even want to right now.” He can feel Dean say oh even though it’s too small to be heard. Surprised, then. He wasn’t offended before. That’s how Dean wears hurt. “You know, I was only saying sorry for not being sorrier. In the way I should be, to dad.” Sam wonders if this will be what makes the material of their—thing—lose its shape, makes it weird. “He’d have killed me if he knew how hot for it I was, for anything with you.” With the claw end of a hammer if that’s what was closest. 

Sorry is a sorry thing to be. Having no remorse is an overall happier way to exist if you can swing it.

=

Weekends are laxer, less structured days and it’s probably not just for patients’ benefit. 

Things can get very harried very quickly for the staff and for the ones sitting at the low end of $10/hour, a few less lessons doled might feel almost leisurely. That’s Sam’s thought, at least. 

They still have talk therapy where no one wants to talk, and education group which mostly consists of non-fiction reading or watching a stop and go video that teaches a handily labeled outline of how to be a person again, properly, and supper that goes a long way to tasting better when you get to sit beside someone who’s pretending it’s veal porterhouse chop and cherry tart creme brulee, but after, they’re free. Freer.

It’s Dean’s turn at chinese checkers when Sam says, “I’d sucked your dick before, hadn’t I?” and Dean’s black peg he’d been thumbing goes skittering across the floor. Sam turns to see how far it went, flown beneath the large L sectional in front of the TV, and turns back to Dean’s eyes bugged, Dean saying, admitting,

“Hey, lower your voice, yeah?” and lowering his to say, “yes.” Then, too jaunty, “it’s something you like to do.”

Sam rolls his eyes without rolling them at all but that does sound like him. “Uh huh. What else.” 

He’s been working backwards and between, letting all that's biting at his brain bite it instead of kicking out at it and Dean’s doing some blank filling for him, where he can. Sam gets the impression Dean knows things to a certain extent. He’s here in the nutter, too, Sam reasons, kind of bleakly. 

He hadn’t intended on rerouting the topic to something so crass but the thought flew right out, remembering Dean whimpering and letting go in his mouth, and now it’s a live one.

“What—what do you mean what else? You want me to tell you everything you like? Dude, I can’t just—”

“Not that. Gimme more stuff. Details. It helps with,” finding them. “Does it always feel like that?” Explosive, die happy, cry hard. “When we’re—”

“Yeah. Always.”

“Okay.” Sam can trust that unambiguously. Puberty popping in wasn’t the first time being around Dean made Sam feel like he’d been starving something inside of himself. He hid plenty of juvenile agonies in the back seat. Touching his brother inside his no-brand jeans must’ve spiraled thirteen and a half year old Sam into a sweetheart’s shock, but he can’t remember it. “Do we kiss a lot?”

“I—”

“It feels like a compulsion. I—kinda constantly want to, but,” the crack between last night and the carnival feels canyoned. When was the last time they had? A week prior? A month? Years stacked? “Is it not that much?”

“It was,” Dean says, picking up a new peg and not looking at Sam. “We used to.”

“It got messy?”

“Something like that.”

“Dean.” The orderlies are lenient, not eliminated, and they’d say something if he reached over to place his palm over Dean’s wrist. “I’m not trying to bring up a sore subject but—”

“No, no. I know. It’s not. It’s just, a little weird to say. So vocally.” Yeah. There are a lot of intricacies to incest. 

“Right,” Sam says, thinking through this. He’s on a case where he’s the case. It's fine. He moves a blue piece somewhere for pretenses. Asks, “so then were you the first person I ever—” 

Dean can train his face until it’s granite but his ears give him away dead. They’re pushing pink. 

“First?” he says, faltered, when Sam thinks he’ll just hop another peg and snub him. “I think, I’m pretty sure,” red red red, “that I’m your only.”

“What?” 

Sam laughs into his hand so no one nags about not being able to hear Wheel of Fortune, laughs until he realizes Dean’s not sleazing, not doing a thing except inspecting the gameboard with incredible interest, then laughs to cover the first laugh, his voice climbing, “That can’t be true? Is it? Dean, are you serious?”

Dean’s stained. “Well how should I know? It’s not like you ever—”

Sam winces. 

“Wow. I don’t know what to say.” He laughs again, different. But he can’t draw up any other faces he may have been with when he tries. And tries. Dean’s not wrong about a lot.

Hell, this is just about even with, no, worse—at O’Gorman High everyone, including Sam, remembered hearing talk about Jackie Mueller bringing her cousin to prom, a little older, couples dancing, slow, real, and how everyone, not including Sam, said some very sick things when someone recognized him, cruel as kids in numbers can be. It was a school scandal. Dean probably even remembers that; it was his grade. And Sam—

“I’ve only had sex with my brother.” He has to repeat it a few times until it sounds less humiliating.

Dean, looking the bad kind of stunned, is staring perfectly at Sam now. 

“Hey, no. Don’t think I’m saying,” but Dean only blinks, and looks kind of shelled. “Dean. Not this again. Man, hearing all this—I’m confused, okay? And embarrassed. But not because,” he touches Dean’s elbow and keeps it under three seconds. “Just, what you must think of me. You can’t say I don’t sound like a fucking freak.” His breath comes out chafed, pained.

Dean works a hand over his mouth, and yes, he’s insulted. “I wasn’t thinking anything like that.”

“Okay.” Sam buffs all his arm hair in the right direction.

Dean leans back in his seat like a pulling away, lost to whatever thoughts Sam didn’t mean to give him, while one of the residents calls out the word cuckold as a guess for the game show. It isn’t it but everyone gets lively and jeering, engaged in new nonsense. 

“Well,” Sam says, quietly, before any of the staff start coming around, “why don’t you tell me some more about what a dickwhore I am.”

“Sam—”

“Please.”

Dean gestures to the plastic table between them that feels—now a lot wider. He says, too careless, tone not quite steady, “how about you just make your move already, alright.” Sam almost broke him.

Sam says, making Dean look up, “I just did, I thought.” Holds Dean’s eye.

=

One of the BPD guys that used to live here came with a list of other ailments attached to him. He’d been urged by his family into seeking help after he’d begun an extramarital relationship with the sink in his master bathroom. It was, by his divulgence, a slim porcelain pedestal with an antique nickel bridge faucet and it sounded attractive, though Sam hadn’t known about sinks enough to say.

In an unpredicted turn of double-infidelity, or maybe just a transferring of affections, sink guy started up a fling with the gunky shower head in the third stall.

Sam had only heard of words like objectophile and animism third-handedly, and in theory. It never seemed like something to laugh about, though.

“God, take off your clothes, take off your clothes,” Dean says, pressing Sam into the wall.

Sam licks at the point of his collarbone, up his neck, bringing Dean's skin up between his teeth, moving on to Dean’s mouth where he’s ready and warm and just as distraught as Sam. He can tell by the way Dean’s kissing him, deep, angry shoves of his tongue that make Sam strain open his mouth, that he’s still cut from what Sam said.

Sam says, “I like that it’s only you,” against Dean’s chin, mashed and difficult to find a long breath between them. 

“Yeah, me too,” Dean tells him, and Sam can feel how much he means it pressed to Sam's leg.

Carved into the discolored tile just behind Dean’s head is a grand gesture proposal that nobody bothered sandpapering off. It’s gouged in anyway, but proportioned, a boxy cursive. The shower head had a name. Someone took their time with making this, wanting it to be beautiful.

Sam works his hands up under Dean’s shirt, scrabbling at his back, his working spine, letting Dean darken the suck mark on his neck that feels like a hot-button now, making him sensitive and horny for it. He contemplates the gashes in the wall and thunks his head back, letting Dean go at him, heart kicking, the only part of Sam that’s never been skinny stiffening to full solid when Dean rocks against him, tight between his legs.

“Sammy, c’mon,” Dean says, a sweet crack in his voice, and Sam helps him tug their pants down to mid-thigh, over a knee, just enough to, just enough for them to—Sam groans, so loud and long that Dean has to kiss him again in a romantic shut the fuck up, rubbing them off together, Sam’s hands down on his ass, Sam shaking like a shelter dog, half undone.

Dean lifts Sam’s leg up and curls it to his hip and Sam hunches up, bumping bare against him. 

Sam comes looking at **Lilah, will you have me?** , his arms locked in protectively around the back of Dean’s sweaty neck.

=

Polyvinyl acetate, zinc, miglyol, silica, mineral oil, sodium carboxymethylcellulose, yellow 6 lake.

If this is what Sam has to keep doing, and it is until they’ve formed something stable enough that’ll hold them up without splintering once they get out, then he doesn’t want to have to keep stealing old man survival trades. It seems unreasonably unkind.

There’s only a few strong squeezes left in the tube currently and Sam reads out the ingredients list to himself, thinks—oh, cool.

A veteran bomb builder, teeth glue is nothing. He can probably whip up a batch of something similar homemade. All they’ll have to do is break into the food storage, the utility closet, and the nurse’s lockbox. Sam sighs, pulling the sheets up to his chest snugly. Maybe it’s better to just keep robbing and repenting the way the rest of the world seems to.

His pill stash is growing though and that’s good. Two sleepers now plus one to weaken hyperactivity from this morning. Tomorrow he’ll take half of the mint one, save the leftovers, take half, leftovers, maybe for a week, until he can disengage completely and not feel cowed by it. Dean has his own shit to worry about without having to come be Sam’s service animal. 

“Waiting for someone?” Camilo says, after Sam’s fourth sigh. 

He seems kind of—something, when Sam looks over.

Sam doesn’t move his head, only his stare. “Maybe. Why? You gonna rat?” 

Camilo bunches himself into his blankets and turns to face the wall. Sam can still hear him say, “no, but I wouldn’t mind if you respected my ears and nose and didn’t stay up jerking yourself off half the night.” He shifts, moody, and falls asleep before Sam figures out what you say back to something like that.

Sam hides a nervous grin in his pillow case, though he’s essentially alone, total fool smile that blushes him down to his happy trail and further, getting a little hard again just from thinking about it, about Dean’s knife hand gripping Sam in the dark. 

He stays looking at the lump on the other side just until the door snicks open.

“Shit,” Dean says, making the bed creak when he crawls in with Sam and Sam tells him his news, their audience, Dean eyeing what’s supposed to be his bed and the form in it for a second. 

Dean throws the thinnest sheet up over their heads like a hidden fort full of tunnels and secrecies, nosing at Sam, pecking at his mouth, and says something so fucking disrespectful about how maybe they should’ve hung Poppy on the doorknob beforehand. Sam laughs, shocked and happy, and climbs on top of Dean’s long body in their hideaway, shhh, nodding, promising to be so quiet.

=

“Did you need somethi—” Jilly says, when Sam comes up to the desk where he knows the sign-up sheet is. “What are you doing that for?”

Sam crosses his name off the list in gel ink, in extra back and forths so it can barely be seen whose handwriting was there in the first place. He ignores her and placidly takes Dean’s name off, too.

“Hey? Why’d you do that? You don’t want to join us for the picnic later?”

As far as Sam knows, they’re autonomous rewards. Just because the in-patients have earned something doesn’t mean it’ll be forced on them. Sam’s done good with his charts and so has Dean but it shouldn’t demand that they go lick popsicles and log wildlife activity on little index cards when it’s just a disguise for more perceptual stimulation. There’s nothing wrong with it but sometimes you have more important things to get to, like memory-locating and planning the next rest of your lives together.

He’s jumping ahead too many steps. Stop. 

“You’ll make us?”

“No.” Jilly’s wearing a chapstick today. A hint of raspberry. “Of course you don’t have to go. You know you’re more than welcome to hang back if you don’t feel up to it.”

“Great,” Sam says, really meaning it. He wonders if she wants to be kissed today. It makes him say, “Dean isn’t going either. We’d rather kick around here and enjoy the empty house.” He’s lying, but it’s not a bad lie, and he doubts Dean will care that Sam’s gotten him booted from the excursion.

“Oh—okay,” she says and just reminds him that he has his appointment with Dr. Ortiz this evening, a little after dinner, yes, yes, Sam knows, Tuesdays and Sundays.

It’s no longer even a real inconvenience, the talk-through, walk-through conversations Sam’s required to have with his personal psychiatrist. There are four of them to divide by, that get designated according to specialty and severity and some just by circumstance, who can make a connection. Sam’s seen them all in passing and he likes Dr. Ortiz best. Likes his choice in gunmetal decor and the icy grey tones woven through his hair that make him look like he’s seen some shit. He’s not afraid to let a profanity fly in Sam’s presence and he doesn’t make Sam feel like he’s being smothered either.

He’s got half a pill in his pocket and a dig of dimple that wants to twist his mouth when Camilo says, prying up Sam’s whole ass, “you’re not coming?”

Sam says, looking very far down to look him in the eye, “uh, no. We’re not.” He didn’t think 24 hours was enough time to form an attachment. 

=

“You aren’t mad, right?”

Sam has to know, but he’s waited until after breakfast to ask, so that he didn’t spoil Dean’s crunchy toast and grape preserves.

“No,” Dean says, walking down the corridor with Sam, nodding at the tech monitoring the day room activity and the exit door. If they’re not going on the field trip then they may as well try to catch a blue morning breeze around here. They head out to the lawns and Dean says, “I want what you want,” that makes Sam feel enormous.

It makes Sam bold enough to say, under a big leafy bur oak, “I almost had a really bad breakdown the other morning, when I couldn’t find you.”

“Did you? How bad?” Dean says, when Sam’s expecting him to say _why? I was coming back._

Sam closes his eyes, jams his hands into his pockets. Laughs small. “I almost—I almost really messed up that kid for no reason.”

“And?”

A few of the residents are scattered amongst the benches and the bushes, engaged in their own conversations, some sitting alone under the sun umbrellas with a notebook and a feather pen that’s just a regular ballpoint with a pigeon’s plume stuck to it with tape, opalescent, self-made pretty.

“And I got fucking frantic.” He doesn’t know what Dean’s wanting him to say. He feels like he’s somehow saying too much.

“And?”

“And I showed him the clowns,” in a rush so it’s easiest, syllables all slung together. He hurries on as Dean turns to look at him, likely seeing how punchy Sam’s cheeks must be. “Not all of them.” 

He says, talking over the nothing that Dean’s saying, “I know. I know what you’re gonna say but it’s not a big deal because I only let him look at certain ones.” Really. Growing up in a moving vehicle, you learn how to make lots of hidey spots. “He wore me down, you’ve seen him. I just wanted—” someone to talk to. For Sam’s whole life, he’s had someone right beside him to talk to, to know him, to show him how to be who he is. Winking and whispering. And, “I really missed you, Dean.”

“We should come up with a net,” Dean says, confusing. “Like a fallback. In case this happens again before we can—”

“You think it’s gonna happen again?” Sam interrupts, his brows hooked in. 

“Well, no. No but—” he sits down in a dry patch of grass by the tree and Sam follows. High above them, there’s an abandoned wasp’s nest, mottled grey and warped. Sam tries to be very engrossed in the details of it because it’s not giving him a good feeling listening to Dean say, “but I didn’t expect it to happen this last time either.” Dean sighs and Sam looks at him. He’s really very beautiful. He must know it. 

“Whatever you say,” Sam says, relenting. He was never not going to. Sharing blood is like a permanent pinky swear.

Dean leans back against the sturdy trunk, crosses himself at the ankles, clears his throat professorially, “Rule one, no killing anyone.” Sam lays down and spreads out in all the green and green and green, grinning large as Dean talks at him. “Rule two, no clowning…”

=

They’re partway through the walking trails, looping through the gardens and shrubbery, past the squirrel feeders that some of them made in Artful Activities out of these giant plastic pickle jars, talking, Sam listening to Dean talk, mostly, running his hand over a spread of dusky purple begonias, snagging one off, smelling it, debating handing it to Dean, not. 

They crook down one of the more pebbly paths that’s less visited and Dean’s pointing out a partial footprint, asking Sam if he can tell which direction the possible revenant may have veered off, trying to keep his training honed even when Sam’s all lithium bleached and there’s noises, maybe about ten meters up, but they’re just people noises, just—shit— It sounds like a date. 

Sam’s not trying to look, but Dean kind of is, and the small stone gazebo might not be outfitted with nanny cams but it’s not the most private place to be found. Sam recognizes the chick—Bibi or Barby—from one of his counseling groups, a slight little black-haired girl with a penchant for disposable pink razors though she looks a little different when she’s not Madame Bovary-ing at the back of the room, when she’s got one ribbon-scarred leg out of her pants, a fumbling hand touching at her small chest under her shirt.

“Wait,” Sam says, sudden. 

There’s a bigger boy with his head between her legs and she’s pressing him down to make sure he doesn’t go anywhere, Sam can see everything from this very giving angle. Dean whops him on the arm, says, “wait nothing,” quiet, riveted.

“No, Dean, I—” the sounds are intimate and rushed, Sam getting a warm, interesting curl of excite centered in his lap, stoking him, and—and an awareness, “I just remembered something right now.” Complaining. How he’d complained. Scared he would taste funny. So afraid Dean would really do it, but more afraid Dean wouldn’t. 

Dean forgets the girl getting licked out, facing Sam to ask, his eyes technicolor, “—about us?”

Sam nods. Us seems like a very big word. Us seems, still, like their whole world. Sam nods again.

=

“Wafer, dear?” Mrs. Mabel says, offering a tupperware dish of cookies to the occupants in one of the commons. Dean takes one, takes two, and Sam fly-swats his hand, declining for them both. 

She’s got her see-through satchel all packed for the day, though, cat-eye beige sunglasses and a satin trimmed scarf to match the old girl’s peepers, indigos and deep grays, a tub of cold cream, a rolled up chunky cardigan, little kisslock coin purse. She might meet her next husband today, Sam bets. He smiles at her. She’s sweet but so is lead acetate. 

Sam watches her flit the room like the convivial host of a posh soiree.

“See that guy?” Dean says, after so long of quietly companionable people watching, pointing out the one in the havana hat doing a bad job of pretending to watch the clock, sliding greedy eyes over to where Sam and Dean sit, toying at the straw brim; it’s Lars. “He wants to footfuck you.”

“You’re sick,” Sam says. “Why do you have to say stuff like that?” But still he grabs an afghan from the side of the seat and drapes it long over himself until he feels curtained enough. 

Dean seems to ignore him, busily scratching at the end of his nose with his middle finger, grin silk and eyes iron, forward facing, and eventually Sam notices that Lars has put his back to them, notices that there aren’t actually things that go ignored by Dean, when it comes to Sam.

Mrs. Mabel finishes mingling. She says on her way out, pausing past them, “Park benches are for honeybirds, wouldn’t you know it?” A beauty mark is stamped above her lip in cosmetic crayon. “Not attending?”

“Nope,” Dean says, squinching in closer to Sam on the loveseat. _It’s a loveseat, Sammy._

“Nah,” Sam says, squirming from her attentions and from Dean’s. “That stuff isn’t for me either. I’m not. I don’t have—one of those.”

She tuts and cockeyes them, their easily doubtable look, the shape their shoulders make pressed together, twin-merging that must look so—but takes her bygone Chantilly perfume scent with her when she goes, Dean’s arrowed up eyebrow begging to dispute Sam. He thumps Dean in the thigh bone, not hard, and tells himself that he should be used to Dean’s sluttiest smiles by now.

The day feels like taffy and Sam sweats.

=

Along with the eleven or twelve others who stayed back either for their own well being or because they’re partly too emotionally disturbed to consent to going off ward, they stand at the small lancet windows in the lobby and watch the hospital shuttles go through the gates and split left, the calm blue half-heart and half-cross logos slipping gone.

It takes a while for the small crowd to crumble and break off and for Dean to say simply, “That was a winning scratch off.” There’s no inflection to it and nothing accusing under his tongue. 

Sam nods. 

Numerically he knows this. The likelihood of an incarcerated person escaping via transport or by simply walking off a worksite program multiplies radically when compared to the alternative, a big box breakout. The success rate is substantially greater, too, according to data compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, and Sam leaves the window to walk to the cafeteria, Dean quiet beside him. Sam’s thought about all this as much as he could stand.

“Three hours seemed too good to waste,” he says, cutting his chicken square into fourths. 

His eyes feel powdery from not blinking, from not wanting to, watching his hands work, back of his neck blossoming warm with the sound of his—proposition, a chump’s assumption that Dean who looks like a genetic impossibility might—want to be with him some more but, more; might be even half as suffering as Sam feels in craving connection. A three hour hugging would still sate Sam.

Dean swigs chocolate milk like it’s Old Crow. 

He’s kind in not pointing out that the hours might’ve been uncountable had they gone to the park, pulled a wild card at the right blink and gone moment, who isn’t accounted for, guys? Where is Dean, where’s his brother? Dean says, dining area a handful shy of completely bare, “Only takes a minute to make a mother out of a good girl.”

=

There’s a feeling like a caress before the feeling of a kick.

Sam—strung up high on plans of what they might do, what he might say to Dean, how Dean might touch him if Sam finds a sophisticated way to introduce Dean’s fingers down the seat of his pants—is shocked to see the state of the room, the changes both old and very, very new.

The grin comes first, a big one that doesn’t just show his teeth but parts them, before he’s got three strands of his own hair in his hand and he’s asking, “Who did this?” and “How did you do this?”

Dean’s toiletry basket, Dean’s misproportioned pillow, fluffier on one side, Dean’s prized classic automobiles photobook. That Sam saved up months to give him on his 18th—Sam has a moment to think it’s his turn at being kicked out of the room but his stuff’s actually all right here, too, nothing gone from sight as far as it’s shown, Dean’s is just mingled in with it—on Sam’s side; Camilo’s belongings unbothered. You might share a room here but you don’t ever share a _bed_. That’s an outrageous violation of the code of conduct and Sam can’t seriously be led to fucking believe—

“Who’d you pay off?” he shucks Dean away from trying to—grab at his sweating palm, maybe. Sam doesn’t look.

The hospital, any hospital, isn’t going to room them up in such a flagrantly together way for pocket change and a please. Dean’s been at his side this whole time, sun up, there’s no way he could have—Sam has to sit himself down before he slumps over because he was made to be a steel-boned boy but—

“It was Jilly?” Cloggy, nothing but a wound when he talks. “Was it?” It had to be. Nobody else here moons that hard over pale skin and softly reddened lips, other than Sam.

“What? What are you—no? I don’t know?”

Caustic, “That’s what all that condom talk was about, huh? Rustled yourself up a rubber somehow?”

“ _What?_ ” Dean says, coming in close. Sam sympathizes for those who head home when they shouldn’t, on a lunch break, to find more than one snake’s trail of clothing.

Sam looks up because he wants to see Dean’s face when he denies it, when he lies to spare his little bulldogged brother who knows he has no right to demand things from him or even ask for them, to want Dean to keep his cock to himself and to Sam’s self, only Sam, when things seemed like they were going—somewhere, like if they hadn’t been related Dean might’ve one day—but Sam wants to see his face if he admits it, too. _Yeah, Sam, did what I had to_ , shrugging his mouth like this was something he did for them, like it wouldn’t kill Sam to picture it, to have to interact with that nurse again after this, Sam might throw up on the bed just so they have to change the sheets.

Dean is—not talking. Sam watches him warily, watches him lurch a little, just a misstep, looking around in something of a stun, taking it in. He sits beside Sam, who’s still having a mental shitfit, says,

“I’m back?” 

“You didn’t know?” Sam tries, taking in his reaction. Looking for tells. Dean isn’t— Okay, Dean’s not that good at faking out.

“I’m back,” Dean repeats, and looks at Sam, an all inclusive search of his face, Sam’s thinned eyes, the press of his mouth, how slimed his hairline must be from all this bedlam and betrayal breaknecking him, and kisses Sam without asking, thick and trembling and really, really not so careful at all. 

It’s mammal reflex, Sam reasons with himself, why he’s lost to it with no conditions, grasping to hold the back of Dean’s head, his wonderfully weird jutted ears, someone’s throat making wretched little sounds, oh god, it’s probably Sam, half in Dean’s lap before he’s gotten a hold of himself, full french with the door slung open.

A temporary solution, Dean says it probably is, crap, man, you were ready to throw my shit off the balcony, licking at Sam’s underjaw, grabbing at him, Sam ashamed, Sam mumbling sorries, kiss me again.

“Condom,” Dean says later, wiping his mouth. 

“What. You said it,” Sam snaps, still trying to be cross. He’s panting, a little. “You said,” throwing his voice low, “‘maybe we can sell it for a condom’.”

“I didn’t mean.” Dean laughs, not recovered either. His hair’s all thatched sideways. “You’re something, Sam.”

Sam adjusts the rumpled front of his pants, impolite about it. “So…?”

“So nothing,” Dean says, lower half of his face so used looking. 

“Something.”

It’s a pathetic attempt at looking contrite, Sam ought to point out, when the corners of a mouth are winged up. “Guess I know it gets you going.”

“Gets me—” Sam says, whispering low and furious. “Were you—were you trying to make me jealous? _Why_?”

But Dean only gives him a fragment of an answer, laughing his way up Sam’s boney bare chest, skinning his shirt off, the techs aren’t gonna come right now, there’s only like three here right now, I checked, god, Sam, god—saying, “she doesn’t even like me, dude. That’s just something you made up to finger yourself to,” shut up, Dean, I don’t—do that, “yeah, look at you, look at your face. You’re thinking about my dick right now, say you’re not,” and Sam can’t of course but mostly because he can’t speak. That’s what he’s thinking about _now_. Hurry and get your pants off, too, before I change my mind. You wouldn’t.

Sam wouldn’t.

Dean says, “quick, Sammy—what’s 157 minus 88?”

“What. What? Sixt—” Sam says, but by then his cock is sunk down Dean’s slippery, moving mouth and they’re doing it.

=

Code 23 has happened—not periodically, just a few times since they’ve been here, though it’s usually about drug trade or boredom or attached to someone’s specific neurosis, ingrained habits. 

Trawling through the other patients to see who’ll bite, an oversexed mind that’s hooked to it and needs it, testosterone blockers not working yet, someone on staff yanking open a mostly inactive storage room to grab a crinkly disposable gown or a safety smock and finding a real sight. Twenty-three, calling down through the halls, twenty-three, if they can’t wrest them apart on their own, if a flat glare and a pointed “wow, guys” isn’t enough for the couple to be done coupling, spring out on their own like cold-hosed cats, get whoever off of the other’s wherever. 

Four day isolation. No desserts with lunch or dinner.

“Talk me through it,” Dean says, above him, keeping eye contact unsettlingly long.

Sam tries to turn his face, “no,” mouthing instead at Dean’s thumb, where his hand is pressed flat to the pillow, lightly spotted and barely haired. He could be a hand model. He could be an anything model.

Dean turns him by the point of his chin, eyes him. “Dude I’m not gonna put it in if you can’t—”

“Please.”

“So try,” Dean gives him a little kiss, above his eyelid, pets his hair back. “Just—try.” 

This is awful, Sam thinks, mad. Down at the day room tournament table they’re playing orderlies vs. residents, a couple of them, Cranium and Snip Snap Snorem, someone’s borderline illicit card deck, nudie pin-up cartoon gals that get overlooked today, it isn’t a day for tickets, and in here Dean’s pressing his whole body down onto Sam’s and making Sam remember the first time they did this, saying sweetly encouraging things now, slow and hopeful, waiting.

If Sam didn’t love him so much, maybe he’d like him a little less. 

Maybe not.

“That Jacobson guy we’d been tailing, that warlock or whatever,” Sam says—makes himself say. 

His bottom teeth rub clunky against the hollows of Dean’s clavicle, easier to talk where Dean can’t see so good. “Um, he—he went after him that night.” Sam’s not going to—he refuses to say dad when he’s trying to get his brother to bone him, and Dean’s nodding against the side of his head, pelvis crushed up right near Sam’s, a little stickying. 

“I passed you that dumb note in the motel,” even though they’d been alone, clinking refilled 7UP cans and arguing over the last ho-ho in the pack only hours before. Dean had been almost grossly pretty then, at that time in his life. “Fifteen and writing my first love lett—”

“Fifteen?” Dean nudges up, away, so Sam can’t feel any sort of hardness and Sam’s eyes widen. He’s testing him?

“Fine, fourteen,” Sam snaps, hips lifting, bringing Dean back down against him and rubbing them together, sighing hard, both knees up near Dean’s hips, his dick slipping just up against where Sam’s sick to death of waiting for it, rimming right up against him but not—going in, god, and in the quiet of the afternoon with the blinds drawn, everything seems a little more necessary; like if he doesn’t cup Dean’s stubbly face and run a finger through his eyebrow, just under an eye, around the generosity of his mouth, pink and pouted and full of the nasty things Sam likes, then he might never get to again after this. It’s an invasive thought, irrational, but Sam takes his time, fascinated by a face he’s never not known.

Dean puts a hand at Sam’s waist, grips him there. He says, “were you thinking I wouldn’t wanna?”

Nodding, Sam shuts his eyes real tight. 

“Yeah, yeah but. I wasn’t even asking for. That.” Sam thinks, isn’t sure how to say—“I didn’t think it was something we’d really,” ever, “get to do.” 

Some shit’s just too bad to give admission to, seeing a pair of boys boxers on the bed, worn, not yours, certainly not dad’s, wanting to—Sam bites brutally down on his lip. Allows, “I’d have, you know, those stomach aches just from you looking at me, even by accident, even when it didn’t mean any—”

“It never didn’t,” Dean says, smudging kisses at Sam’s cheek, the curve of it, tonguing shallowly into his mouth then gone like a terrible game. “It never didn’t, Sammy. Always meant something. Alright?”

“Yes.” 

“Continue,” Dean says, hand to the back of Sam’s loose thigh, like readying—

It’s fucking with Sam a lot, Dean making a little mess in the crack of Sam’s ass, just behind his balls and then making Sam _talk_ and play fetch and he stomps a foot into the mattress, legs fanning, hands crawling all over the arch and dip of Dean’s back, restless, and Sam has to say, “Fuck, dude, what is this? Do you get off on my embarrassment now? I can’t—say this shit, I can’t."

“If it helps to know,” Dean goes a dull candy red. Sam listens, trying to calm a hectic heart. “I came real fucking close to unloading it right in my hand, before we even—at just the thought that I’d be putting me inside you.”

Sam stills. 

He says, elbowing up to get closer, fast, 

“Dean, I don’t wanna to do this. I don’t want—I remember. I remember, alright? All of that stuff. You said facedown and I wouldn’t ‘cause I wanted to watch you, watch when you—and it hurt, but not like you thought it did. And then it was over and I hated that it was over and I almost cried and you smelled like Calvin Klein Eternity and beer, okay? You did. What.”

Dean swallows. He knocks Sam’s legs wide again, his face uncontrollable so he just doesn’t try.

“Lay back,” Dean says and Sam does and Dean tilts him, worms the start of a finger in to see if he’s still—yeah, he really is, and he doesn’t say anything else anymore but Sam’s back still comes off the bed when Dean sinks his dick slowly in there, the heavy heat of it so so so good, opening Sam’s hole up wet, Sam shocked, Sam’s eyes flickering, his armpits really hot.

Sam takes it with relief, run through with vulnerable sobbing.

Even if Dean didn’t know expertly how to fuck, he’d still know how to do it with Sam, how Sam would want, and he does, bracketing Sam in with the lean bulk of his arms, working in and in and not giving Sam any real room to do much else but kiss messily at Dean’s mouth, saying yes, stammering a small please, absorbing the idea that this is something they really do, together, have done before, will do again. 

Sam melts out into the thin panel of mattress like it’s a honeymooner’s bed, shaped symmetrically like a heart, a bright, beating red.

“Can you—”

Dean tenses, like he’s gonna stop. “What? Do you not want—”

Sam curls a slender leg around Dean’s back, his ass, and it does feel slender, right now, not just thin and stickish the way he’ll usually handle the idea of himself if he’s naked and aware of it.

“Could you hold onto my hand?” Sam says, all he was meaning to say, and Dean is Dean so he does it as soon as Sam asks, puts his left into Sam’s right, neatly filling up the negative spaces between, holds and locks and keeps solidly fucking, keeps saying Sam’s name to himself like a timing tactic, trying not to—and telling Sam how he’s so—fuck, you’re just beautiful, “do you like this? Just say you do, just say—”

“I need you to not stop,” Sam begs, the size of his dick between their bellies more than enough. “I need you—” and he doesn’t manage to get the rest out, Dean sucking a hospital crime high at his neck and making him leak a thick line of cock-drool, and it’s fine about the rest because there is no rest, that’s it.

Dean hides there for a while, his nose in the chaos of Sam’s hair, pumping his hips and Sam can see a little over Dean’s shoulder, down their sides, the rungs of Dean’s ribcage every other jolt, contrasts of their skin in places, how natural it looks for Dean to be breaking Sam’s legs open.

Dean says like an injury, “you know it’s so easy to be obsessed with you,” gulping his breaths, thrusting groans out of them both.

Sam would die if he didn’t kiss him right now, he thinks, big, silly thoughts and Dean eats at his mouth for what must be an hour when he tells him this like he's confiding it, Dean’s shoulder blades winging together in strain under Sam’s hand, the back of Sam’s knee resting in the scoop of Dean’s elbow, a leg languid over Dean’s shoulder, bouncing obviously, rhythmic thumping sounds for so long and so long, trying to hold it, dick kicking damp against the soft of Dean’s stomach—

Dean’s once-honey hair has skulled down just from sweat, browned at his temples, oh god, oh god, someone’s gonna hear, dude shut up, I can’t, hand hard over Sam’s mouth, bed clacking, no one coming, Sam coming, _Dean, Dean,_ strings of it thrown all over his belly, Dean still going, pressing up into him in ruts, “don’t fall asleep, hey,” holding his legs up, losing it in him, staying inside until Sam’s only throbbing empty spits.

=

“Quit it,” Sam says, punching out with his ankle so it dangles off the bed but Dean just starts in on the other, tracing out the prominent veins spanning the top of Sam’s foot like a glovebox map.

Sam’s trying to be cool, do post-sex like a normal person. Laying silently, unaffected, a casual observation about bone density, or. Sam chews a piece of skin off his lip. Maybe that isn’t what normal people do. 

“So you said—sleeping bags,” Sam tries. 

Kept in a small section at one of the monitoring stations, only a fist full of them, they’re for the times when somebody more temperamental, usually one of the younger ones, is having trouble adjusting and doesn’t have the means to grasp why, more comfortable taking a nap by the nook or near a tech or anywhere not patient lodging, a grace period before they have to immerse. Dean mentioned it offhand, said maybe, I dunno. 

“You think they’ll give you one for in here?”

Dean only has his pants on and Sam only his shirt, smoothed under the blankets from chin to shin while Dean footsies him with his fingers. 

Dean says, thumping a fuller nerve, “Probably have to.” But he’d also said maybe they were just sanitizing his new space or something, we’ll see how it plays. Sam’s not ready to think of Dean leaving the room again so he coolly doesn’t. 

“I wasn’t going to fall asleep either,” Sam says, still kind of wondering about that. He sounds dry. His ass is loaded wet. “Yes, okay, let me just sack out at the precipice of—that. I’ll just—”

“You have before?” Dean says, but unconcerned.

“Oh.” Sam says, not really minding whatever Dean’s doing down there. Not really. “I sound like a thrill in bed.”

“You are,” Dean says, very quiet.

“Oh,” Sam says again, fucking fond of him so bad, “I—” he smiles, “okay, what the fuck are you doing with my feet, stop, stop—” but Dean only baby-kisses the heavy bow underneath one, mumbles there _what, he’s right, you do have really fuckable feet_ , and catches Sam’s other when it tries to clap him, easy laughs, but putting it down against his crotch anyway, interested, warm, oh.

=

Calm down.

“Calm down, calm down. I want to, I promise,” Dean says, biting little bites against his inner thigh, his head half-hidden by Sam’s legs trying to close up on him, Sam’s eyes big in their sockets, a massing wad of sheets packed into his palm, fisting at it. Sam’s mouth shakes open.

“You shouldn’t. I’m all—”

“Yeah, that’s _why_ ,” Dean says, hot. Nosing down. Sam breathes harder. “It’ll be even better.”

But. “Hey, I don’t have to. I wanna but I won’t,” Dean says, resting his cheek against Sam’s dipped-flat lower tummy instead, blowing a little breeze that tickles at his leg hair, the cog of his hip bone, knowing easily that Sam would rather not be looked at right now in the eye, feeling particularly bloodstained across the face. “Tell me to stop. I will. If you say stop, I’ll—” but Sam puts a hand soft to the back of Dean’s head.

“Sam, say stop.”

Sam inhales, tips up his hips. “Go.”

He’ll think about it later, in Dr. Ortiz’s office, laughing it back, zeroing out his face when Dr. Ortiz motions Sam into the cushy chair opposite his own, a little ‘talking corner’ with two seats, one for Dr. Ortiz and one for the—for Sam, not behind his desk because Dr. Ortiz believes in communication without barriers, literally and illustratively, and Sam looks out his unbarred window with the mini rock assortment on the sill, the rose quartz and the magnetite clusters, some common pebbles, a group of milky calcite. Dr. Ortiz is a collector, too. Out the window, Sam can see eighteen wheelers and moving vans, work trucks, stalled cars. He looks for imposing, gleaming black ones and sees too many, can’t find even one.

Dr. Ortiz’s copper ore is Sam’s favorite, if he had to choose, the size of a hand, a grown man hand. 

Dr. Ortiz has Sam’s weekly chart open in his lap like a holy writ, the manila spread of it angled so Sam can see, too. It’s important, we don’t want to keep anything from you that you need to know. 

This happens bi-weekly, Sam gets it. He wonders what Dean’s doing right now, if he’s gotten started on the scavenger hunt, finding things for the glue recipe they still need. Sam bets he’s picked up at least a few. 

“Nurse Jewett notes that your participation level has seen quite the uptick,” Dr. Ortiz tells him, dragging his pointer through specific ticky-points down the page, cuticles nourished the way a moneymaker’s always are, reading aloud, kind of losing Sam there for a minute while Sam shifts his tailbone around in the seat, “high marks and a team player mentality with your new roommate,” thinking of Dean putting his sick mouth all hot and stretched right there around Sam, it’s okay, I like it so much, Sam, sucking at him, working the wet muscle of his tongue in and lapping, shoving the backs of Sam’s thighs to his hammering chest, tendering him where he was ached and open and so fucking gross, so fucking good, and Dr. Ortiz is apologizing, sort of, “—discussed and decided, and we felt that you might be ready.”

“What.”

We’ve talked about this, he says without saying, same spiel, same Sam, and Sam auto-resents whatever comes next after that clucked look and he’s right to.

“Trust that we’re going to be considerate of your circumstance every step of the way, all of us here,” oh, this again, we want this for you, strong efforts, untreated childhood trauma, and, “I’ll say, on record, that I’m personally prided by your progress this month,” but, “but we also can’t keep hindering your growth here in anyone’s good conscience.” 

Sam stopped sprouting when he was nineteen. Almost a foot higher than Dr. Ortiz when they’re standing, though. Whatever.

“You do understand that the inclusion of a new occupant to your quarters is a positive thing, Sam?” sure, nod, and Dr. Ortiz mouthing off something stiff and swung hard about a learning curve, Sam having had a ‘troubling day or so,’ not letting the extra bed unit go unoccupied any longer, I know it’s a difficult change and we _are_ here to work through this with you, perceived loved ones stick around because we want them to, can continue until the adjustment settles but so far I’d say—

“Honeybird,” Dean said, smeary against Sam’s soaking cock, a humbling, happy smile, hair all pulled at, chin just—creamed, going back to work Sam’s ass over some more, Sam saying nonsense, Sam on the way to unexpected, tumbling orgasm.

=

Dean’s spinning in an old one-off desk chair that they leave in the TV area, bouncing a racquetball against the wall and catching it on the spin back, the others in the room kind of in the void, tired from an afternoon of fun and not harping on him to quiet his goddamned noise. He’s waiting for Sam, Sam sees, when Dean tosses the ball into a plant pot and stops at a semi-circle as soon as he notices Sam’s come back into the population.

“How’d it go?” he says, a little of the orange meat sauce from dinner hanging around his upper lip.

Sam wipes it away in a hurry and nobody has to chide, “no touching,” remind them that he’s not allowed to touch his own brother because they say so. “It went,” Sam says. 

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” The floor’s been recently mopped and everything in their corridor smells like fake hawaiian breeze and sterilization, like home now. Sam sits down on it, just outside the room against the wall, not ready to go in there again yet, when everyone’s back and they can’t just, be—together. He’s probably handling this about as well as anyone would believe, and about as well as he is because Dean’s here; Dean’s the crutch. “They don’t think you’re real.”

It sounds unconscionable to even say and he’s not certain why he is. Dean doesn’t have to know. 

But Sam tells him everything, even his most shameful, weakest bits—how he likes to hear the digestion taking place in Dean’s abdomen just because, how many times he thought about them not just running away but worse, the only thing lasting enough that’d mean they’d get to stay gone, alone but together, orphans, how—

“Were you,” Dean says, sitting, too. Reaching out to fix Sam’s hair behind his ear and not doing it, thinking better, tugging it instead but it still feels conciliatory, and Sam wants to hate it for that but can’t. It’s Dean. “Were you expecting that?”

Sam laughs, “not really. But I guess you were.”

Dean stretches his legs straight out in front of him so they’re laid out like duplicates and, only when Sam’s looking, pretends to mash his bent out knees together, struggling, trying, like Sam used to ask him to do when they were bored and feeling really lukewarm about powering through ten more sets of military crunches, Sam needing a laugh so it didn’t become a wail and Sam takes that for the yes it is.

“‘Heavy daydreamer,’ is what they’re going with,” Sam says, not stuck to any one feeling, not yet. “Like—like some real life Enter Sandman shit. That’s what he thinks of me, what they all do. They just—think that that’s what you are to me.”

Dr. Ortiz said that, said a lot of other things along with it; some stuff he didn’t have to say at all. Sam’s permanent file is an overfull bounty of prognoses that’d be interesting enough to pick through if it wasn’t a biography all about him and the things other, experted people think are confound and fascinating and wrong with him, misdiagnosed multiple times, a take home project in a person, written against his will.

“I mean, look at me,” Dean says, shouldering him some. “I’d daydream me, too, you know?”

=

_Prolonged psychosis_ is the first search Sam tries, clacking at the stiff khaki keys of the old keyboard, one of five little stations in the computer lab that most of the residents have no use for, not enough speed and no access to porn torrents, all the dinos loaded heavy with a glut of parental control type software most others might not know how to undetectably disenable. 

It brings up a good deal of intel but nothing that feels Sam enough to Sam. 

A lot of these things sound like they can be just about anybody who’s ever lived a life. Anxiety, suspicion. Hey, who the hell hasn’t been uncontrollably angry? 

Postpartum struggles. That’s more specific but nothing Sam can work with. The page about electroconvulsive therapy gives him an immediate image of a cool Jack Nicholson chomping at the mouth guard so he reads up on that a little, not for fun but kind of for fun; it’s one of Dean’s most watched. So Sam’s, too, by very definition.

He clicks around a little, doesn’t think anyone in his family’s had a history of Huntington’s.

“Try that other one,” Dean says, teething his top lip, his concentrating tic.

Sam looks studyingly at him, puts _paracosm_ into the bar using the home row without eyes, taking in a lot more of the specificity of Dean’s profile than anything popping up. Nobody’s this good at fantasy. Dean’s too elaborate looking to just be someone’s unhealthy thoughts. Sam says before he wimps out, “I knew her, didn’t I?” and deciding not to let Dean say anything skanky or leering about—anything, he adds, “That lady. Annise.”

“Do you think you did?”

“Dean,” he says, a little pleaded.

Dean looks like he may stubborn out of it, slipping his stare to the open door behind Sam for just a second, a getaway, but he says, “yes,” where Sam can either pretend to not have heard or accept.

That badge boasted twenty years of service, Sam got a good look. A good enough look. “Has she. Do you know if she’s always worked—” with kids. “There. Since—” Dean nods and Sam can’t make believe the seriousness of it away. “Fuck. Are you. Dean.” Miserable, “how long have we been living here?”

“Dude, maybe this is enough for today. You know?” he gets up, tucks his chair in properly. 

Sam kicks it askew out of senseless spite, refusing this, refusing—all of it. 

There’s no way. There’s not. Sam had a mom and a dad and a Bobby, and not cardboard cutouts of them that he played paperdolls with. He almost landed an atomizing blow to dad’s eardrum once, just the once, would’ve if Dean hadn’t stepped—Dean’s his most lavishly embroidered but that was predisposed to be so, the one fixed point in his life and dependable. If there’s Sam, then there’s Dean.

He’s the only reason Sam never felt dirt poor, even when they were constantly so.

“No,” Sam says, hitting the mouse clicker with more aggression than maybe called for, the details of this—paracosm complex making his stomach yank, scrolling through it, skimming, skin feeling greener than Dean’s stare when Dean says, “hey, stop. I’m saying stop. Listen to me.” 

Sam does listen. Dean’s more commanding than dad by a hot hundred degrees.

“We can try again tomorrow,” Dean says, turning the light off in the lab when they go.

“How many tomorrows, though?” Sam says helplessly, but Dean doesn’t answer him, halfway down the hall, let’s go to bed, come be with me.

=

There’s at least two other reasonably feasible contingencies here that Sam can see even in the dead dark, even with Dean thumbing maddeningly, lovingly at the wet head of his dick, and one has to do with not seeing at all.

“Visibility curse,” he says, low into the blankets, where Dean’s head had seemed to be going. “What if that’s what this is?”

Dean looks annoyed despite the non-light. His head comes up from under the sheet. “You’re serious right now. Right now?”

“Yes,” hissed. “This is important.”

“Yeah, you’re right. Sure it is. But this isn’t another something that can be looked into in the morning? Maybe when I’m—um, not trying to get laid? Or you wanna break curfew and go ask that one tech with the two foot ponytail down his ox back whether or not he can feel me touching his tit? Sammy, please. Think.” But it’s so hard when Dean’s so hard, when he’s letting Sam know of it. 

“Okay, no, yeah,” Sam nods. Tomorrow, then. 

That’s more logical when thought through like that, even though Sam wasn’t suggesting anything so obnoxious, more like powder veiling or baiting one of the others into a few simple toss tests, experimental, maybe, so when Dean pulls Sam’s underwear the rest of the way down his legs, Sam’s not thinking about the second in the set, not wanting to. It’s less harrowing this way, besides. Sam just won’t wonder about it. He’ll stop trying to recall the last time his brother used table salt with his meals. 

=

Monday feels like an altogether better day. 

Sam brushes and flosses and rinses his come mouth, and stockpiles his pills so they clink around like coins, fixes at his hair when his reflection shows him all fuck-rumpled. 

Camilo is here, and there, and mildly aggravating now, so Sam just avoids him and his importunate looks; he’s voluntary, not commited, he’ll probably be out the fence in a couple of weeks. And then they’ll throw someone else in Sam’s yard. Sam sighs big but there’s no need to get worked up over it now when Dean will be waiting for him, holding bagels and cinnamon butter if they haven’t run out, if he made it down to the cafeteria first.

Sam doesn’t sincerely think him invisible, if he’s rooting deep down, not with any real faith backing it. It would almost be a small amusement if it were true, but it would, factually, only bring down more questions and trap holes in the theory of it, even if Sam isn’t really ready to think anything else. 

“Auditory hallucination,” Sam says when Dean asks, taking a big bite out of his blueberry bread. 

“And what was the other one? Erotic—something? Tell me.” 

Sam sips his juice pulp extra slow. “Erotomania.” And, “no.”

“I like that one,” Dean says, flattering himself, balling up his greasy napkin. He looks like he’d taste like cinnamon right now, yeah. “Let’s just say you have that. I’m good with it. Done.” 

“No.” The entire basis of it breaks down into something really demeaning, with the subject often being meek and sexually inexperienced and wishing for an impossible boy, usually, it’s usually a boy, to notice them and want them back, urgently. 

“I don’t ‘have that’,” Sam says, flattened, but he still sounds a little heart-shot underneath it even to himself so, fuck, maybe he does. He doesn’t. 

Not that, not either of those, and not obsessive love disorder or false memory syndrome or, the really ridiculing one, delusional companion syndrome; Dean talks to him too much for Sam to be buzzing out whole conversations for the both of them and Sam isn’t quite so piggish to think up a third of the shit that comes out of Dean’s mouth like bullet spray anyway, the things he’ll just—say. Get away with saying because he’s both intimidating and intimidatingly gorgeous, everything Sam told Camilo he’d be.

“Ready?” Dean says, chucking both of their trash.

“I guess,” Sam says, not as disturbed as he supposes he should be by any of this. “Yes.”

= 

It was different, hearing it in Dr. Ortiz’s office, in the analytical way he spoke about it like looking at microscope slides and watching germs move, kind but easily detached when done, home to his pearl-button wife, sleeping fine, clinical about it—than it is processing through the grids of it with Dean, who helps him pull up corners and shine in pen lights, who makes it kind of funny, asking— _frotteurism? That doesn’t even sound real_ , and, “You’re just pulling shit outta your ass now, right? That’s not a thing, is it?” when Sam brought up the ‘mirrored-self misidentification’ concern like Dr. Ortiz mentioned to him before he asked Sam, letting Sam molest the wild green copper ore,

“Dean’s been with you a long time, hasn’t he?” 

“Yeah,” Sam said, setting it down. He didn’t say forever but Dean would’ve understood.

=

Dean’s just gone for a quick drink of water after Community and Sam’s left alone, waiting against the wall.

Some people are very bad with body language, can’t tell a barky yip from a belly growl to save their life. Camilo comes over, heys him. He doesn’t say too much about much but it feels like a conflict.

“Don’t you have—” somewhere to be? Sam bites it off.

“Look,” Camilo says, and Sam would rather not.

“Look, I know it’s not any of my business,” Camilo says. He still smells like ears. “But you’re kind of making it my business when you just keep,” gaudy gesture, “and they don’t let me trade rooms or anything—” 

He says so as though he’s tried, truly tried, and it’s surprising, enough that Sam smiles to himself, just very small, like this could be a campus dorm with noise control and pet restrictions and an RA named Jean, like Camilo’s actually gone and asked to be switched because Sam can’t stop having sex with his brother and—good, Sam thinks, maybe they’ll do it again tonight right on the floor.

“Hey, I’m not trying to start—nothing,” Camilo says. “You’re cool. We could be cool.”

“But I’m too loud?”

“Yeah, and—” Camilo looks long down the hall, something smuggling. “Is he here right now?”

“Are you mocking me?” Sam says, slowly. 

“No, see. That’s not. I really like brain teasers,” Camilo says, eager to say, “and you’re like a changing rebus puzzle, it’s pretty systematic,” and, proud, “I got you, though. I figured it out. Why I can’t meet him. It’s because I _can’t_ meet him, isn’t it? Right?”

“Move.” 

New warmth coming in blotchily up Sam’s face.

“No, c’mon. I’m just. Big thinking here. And I—I wanna help,” hey, don’t go, hey, as Sam’s going, shoving around him.

Not enough yet to cause a scene but—escalating, with haste, like he’s been about to burst with it—that he hears everything in there, yeah, the things he’s got you saying to him, he's got you cuffed up and you’re letting him, you’re just taking it, you’re—Sam slows, four and a half steps to hear, “He’s not—he isn’t giving you any butterflies, okay, he’s not. He just isn’t. I’m sorry. He’s giving you Munchausen, if anything.”

Dean’s done drinking, coming back around the hub to get him.

“Don’t start nosebleeding about it, Sam,” Dean had said, finding them two corner seats while the rest of the residents were gathering, scuffling in with their runny noses and sleep deprivation, Dean looking unfussed and stunning, “shit could be a lot lot worse for us, you know?” 

“Yeah,” Sam said, reaching over and—tracing out Dean’s mouth. Putting one whole long finger inside of it like a soft, wet fruit, Dean looking at him strangely, then in solemn understanding. With no whistles shrilling and no codes called of any number, Sam said, thoughtful, “lot worse.”

“You mean Stockholm,” Sam says, “and he’s not.” He looks at Camilo for the last real time and tells him, only as gently as he can, “But I’m not really the one of us here who thinks the butterflies are really inside him, am I?”

=

_Once_ , Dean says when Sam all but handjobs it out of him, makes him say, tell him, “yeah, one other—once before.” 

He doesn’t say a lot more than this and Sam can’t put together if it’s a can’t or won’t, if Dean’s refusing or evading him, if there are perimeters to this thing, if they’re simply blind spots for Dean.

It’s a blustery, greyed over midday, overgrown grass out on the lawn gone to longer blades, swishing now and again with wind, the groundskeepers not having been out back in a while, not too bad, enough that the toads can hide, try to hide, but Sam can still see them from the lookout point, out there on the other side of the glass, even in the rolling fog.

Slanted up against a big white pillar, he’s grounded by two cool hands around his neck, being kissed on and felt up and all the other amorous things places like this in the world are meant for, hands put down pants and trembled up skirts, declarations from horned up high schoolers, swears and promises to be forgotten by the next great love. Sam, who’ll only ever have one of those, says when his lips are pinkly raw, “are you, though—are you real? If you know, just tell me. I don’t care. I won’t—”

“Am I real to you?” Dean says—asking, really asked. The freckle centerstaging his bottom lip stands out even bolder, after seven good minutes with Sam.

“Yes,” Sam says, fine to look him in the eye, like this, and fine to feel the spiked sting of it when it comes, when Dean thumbprints it, tracks the slide of it down the hang of his cheek so it’s gone like it never happened, says, “Then I’m real.” 

But outside the wasp’s nest has fallen and Sam remembers the net, remembers all the things Dean prepared him for, running checklists and making Sam parrot him, again, what else, you always wanna have that bomb shelter when the sky starts shitting ammo, Sammy, one more time—carefully laid out protocol for what Sam would and wouldn’t be doing if he couldn’t find Dean for a paranoid day again. 

It had been about lost-and-finding, then, Sam thought, but maybe it was really just— Sam does and doesn’t want to know, “Have I done this before? To you? Have I ever—” forgotten Dean. Set him down someplace and didn’t know it, didn’t come back to see if he’d still been there, or, “Did I do—”

“You didn’t mean to,” Dean says, still very sweet about. He’s—the best at hugs, any kind. “I’m sure it was an accident. And look,” he says, looking down the length of himself. “Everything still works.”

Sam can’t laugh, or even smile through it, even a drawn on smile, even a made up one. 

“When.” 

“Eighteen,” Dean will finally say, once Sam has figured he’d just leave it, flit to something else, let’s go see if we can fuck with the radio volume and raise some hair around here, and Sam will stay up all through the night thinking about it, holding Dean’s hand, wondering if Dean’s really asleep, if he should wake him, thinking of Dean saying, um, “you were eighteen and criminally cute and we were so good. I thought we were so good, every day up until—” you left, or I left. I don’t really know how that—goes. Dean saying, “It was bad for, for a while,” no, I don’t really know why you—maybe you were moving on, “you almost didn’t come back. I didn’t know if you were coming back that time,” in a tone like he’s the one who’s sorry for it.

Sam will shiver, cold-boned by the polarizing thought that he could’ve ever just—gone somewhere, gone on and left Dean behind like an abandoning, and he’ll squeeze at Dean’s hand but he won’t break it, he’ll think of Dean saying, “Sam, hey, don’t be mad at Sam. Sam didn’t know. You didn’t know, okay? I’m fine now, I’m fine,” and Dad was the one to warn them to never show your fears but it was Dean that taught Sam how not to cry. 

=

Sam’s goal for the day is tackleable, and though he isn’t about to write it down, he sticks to it, and starts in on it as soon as he gets a break between rotations, cleaning out his clown drawer and redepositing them into a new place in the closet where he’s hunked out a hole in one of the walls, lined it with an accumulation of small plastic bags so nobody gets dusty or grouted in there.

“What will you do?” Dean says, watching him work. Sam knew he was there, knew it wasn’t going to be anyone else.

“About?”

“Me,” Dean says. 

Sam’s got the width of his back to him, putting away the jester and the jack and the ceramic headed one with the silk body and blue curly hair, painted like a girl doll with eyelashes and small lipsticked lips, delicate triangles above and below her little gem eyes, so he can’t see what Dean’s hiding but he can hear it just fine. It’s hurt, and a soft-hearted hurt that he thinks Sam doesn’t know about.

He finishes up with what he’s doing, huddling them all together for warmth, so they don’t get lonely or anything ridiculous so far away in the closet. He shuts the door of it when he’s done, closing them in, and says, “nothing. I’m not going to do anything,” bending down to kiss Dean a little, open mouthed and warm, just because sometimes he has to. “I’m in love with you.”

He can guess by Dean’s look that he’s maybe never told him that before, so spelled out. He’ll say it more often, then. If Dean wants. If Dean will always look this startlingly beautiful, this brilliantly detailed. Sam knows he will.

“Not—”

“No,” Sam laughs. “Not any of them. Come on, man. Those are dolls.”

Dean looks at the closet, at Sam, long at Sam’s hands. “They are, but,” but he stops himself. 

=

While they’re watching _Wild Strawberries_ with the group, Dean leans over to ask what he’s thinking about, you’re on about something, you look—

“You,” Sam says, strangling down the rest of it, the ‘always you,’ that’s the truth it, but not out of humiliation, just because he likes that he doesn’t have to say everything, that Dean is a genius at deciphering him. “And about how we can keep the room to ourselves. Don’t be unhappy with me, please.”

“I won’t be,” Dean says, and isn’t when Sam tells him. But he says, only asking, “what about rule number one?”

“I know,” Sam says, hushed as he can get during a quieter, drabber part of the film. “I wasn’t going to do it without running it by you first. If—if you had any objections, or,” Dean watches him with a certain method to his eyes, “suggestions.” 

Being Dean’s sole focus is a very powerful stimulant. 

“I just. I think I should do this.” 

It’ll be quick, and fine, and then everyone will know—the extra bed is extra but it isn’t _available_. There’s no room in their room for more than two. 

He knows Dean has his worries about Sam, like about the fight they’d had last Thursday, the reason Dean had gone to sleep in the other bed in the first place, whatever it had been about—

“You don’t remember?” he’d asked, and Sam tried and tried but couldn’t, and Dean told him nevermind, leave it, it wasn’t important, he didn’t want it to happen again, if that was what made it easier for him to be blipped out—

“Wait,” Dean says, “not—” he pulls Sam in by the back of the neck, grip hard and horse-shoed like he might shove Sam’s head down right here, “not like that, you can’t,” he says when Sam tries to tell him what he’s planned so far, nothing with complexities or too involved, he can just go grab something puncturing out of their trade box, and I told you, he’s always bleeding. Maybe not, um, that much, but—

Dean smiles helplessly at Sam’s silliness, but he also tells Sam to think of something else, “Be smart.” Someone else’s mud, remember? Clean feet.

=

Sam checks in with him constantly, just a simple, “hey, did I miss anything?” or, “we good?” or even a shared look over everyone else’s noise to say _hi, still here, it’s still you_ , and he keeps a small calendar that they made together by the bed, Dean’s little squiggle drawings, and curly hearts put in by Sam on individual dates, if it’s important, a flip-book style calendar with all the days left of the rest of the year for him to tear off, easier to track if something’s gotten screwed up. 

It hasn’t, though, not for a long time now. Not in months. 

Daily routine is that Dean will rise with him and doze with him and sometimes they’ll oversleep, if the night before was especially enthusiastic, if someone’s wearing pretty plum cheetah spots all up and down their neck, the well-loved small of their back, a giant devil of one glowing hot somewhere under the scrubs for safekeeping.

No one has yet to ever sit or stand or walk through the spaces Dean’s in, while he’s in them, and they won’t. It isn’t only that Sam refuses to let them. Dean embodies those places. Every place he’s ever been.

Sometimes Sam will wonder about dad and what he’s up to, if he’s still out prowling for soul-eaters and riding down unpaved rickety roads, hot on the tail of something hideous, a mean sonofagun, if he’ll come bust them out once he’s done, if he’s ever done. Sometimes he’ll wonder enough to even ask Dean about it, at lunch over melty grilled cheese sandwiches, what he thinks, but it rarely feels like it’s worth wasting the thought on. 

Dr. Ortiz mentions Dean occasionally, not by name or any direct reference, but he’ll say things, ask if Sam’s still struggling with camaraderie, if there’s anything he’d care to chat about, if he’s feeling too alone, would he like to try again with having a—

“Not yet,” Sam says, is very good about not saying a hard no—while Dean waits for him by the window where the rock collection is, picking up a glossy red jasper, toying it between two fingers, watching what sights he can see while Sam finishes up his session.

He comes in here with Sam now, too, just to do it, just because nobody stops him and Sam wants him near, and it’s been such a treat. Dr. Ortiz has no idea Dean’s tipping each fancy frame on his wall by an annoying centimeter to amuse Sam, and the big bonus of this ordeal is that now that they know Dean can go everywhere with him, he’s never much further than a blown kiss away. 

They have a tendency to favor their little box of a room most, though, even over the marigold gardens and the arched alcove in the laundry room where Sam gave head for nearly a complete twenty minutes on a sludgy evening when hardly anyone at all came in, probably because it still feels a little like their first real welcome mat home, the one place in the world they’ve stuck around the longest.

Sammy loves Dean loves Sammy, and it says so where it's scratched into the wall by their bed like a Lilah.

“I don’t mind them,” Dean says, lying, at least a little, when Sam catches him looking over at the closet door, shut tight.

“Dean, I don’t want you to feel like—”

“I don’t, I don’t,” Dean says, “it’s just.”

Sam understands the way Dean will use silence as its own language sometimes. 

How he'll get grieved by guilt, that he'll think a bunch of stuff but won’t say, that he wants things, wants to ask for things, wants to not have to ask for them, wants, if Sam surely knows the black and white of him by now, for Sam to say, to tell Dean that he’ll never think about any other little moss-eyed boys again, or ones with sunned golden hair or a wide-open musical laugh thrown to the sky, July written all over their skin with little peppered dots—gone missing outside old trinket shops or taken right beside a horsey carousel, a school yard, a big rust-pink swing set by a motel called The Good Luck Lodge, where someone, surely, should have been watching.

“Let’s throw them away,” Sam says, getting up from the bed, scooting to bypass the wet spot. “I don’t need them. They’re really nothing now.”

“Sam, no, no. You really like them. It’s okay. I’m just being—”

But Sam will unearth them again, all of his once happy treasures, and carton them up for the hospital’s quarterly donation weekend, let the staff decide what to do with them, if they’ll go on to kitsch stores or resale alleys or just get chucked in with the cafeteria waste out back. Sam is okay with saying these final goodbyes, wishing long new lives to the marionette clown, the teddy clown, the clown book that had gone in, too, the day someone ate a couple of bad wafers, assumably. 

He’s unable to see any of these old friends holding his even most minor interest again, his heart like a crowbar.

“Now it’s just us,” Sam says when they’ve gone, enjoying the shining sincerity of Dean’s smile, his shock. 

Sam looks at him, at his paralyzing beauty even in the phosphorescent white of the ward, and still can’t quite find it in him to understand how anyone might not notice him, or think he’s not really there. Dean’s so big. So Poppy coyly kisses the side of Dean’s sweetest face and reminds him that tomorrow is Donut Day.


End file.
